Speaker
Description
The production of heavy-flavour hadrons in hadronic collisions can be calculated with a factorisation approach, as a product of parton distribution functions (PDFs), partonic hard- scattering cross section, and parton-to-hadron fragmentation functions, assumed to be universal among different collision systems. Recent measurements of baryon-to-meson production yield ratios at the LHC, observed to be enhanced compared to measurements in e+e– and e+p collisions, challenged this assumption, suggesting a modified hadronization of heavy quarks in hadronic collisions with respect to in-vacuum fragmentation.
Additional modifications to the heavy-quark hadronisation process are expected in heavy-ion collisions, where the large density of deconfined quarks may favour the formation of hadrons via the coalescence mechanism, the increased abundance of strange quarks could enhance the production of charm-strange hadrons, and the presence of collective motion of the medium can affect the momentum distribution of the produced hadrons.
In this presentation, a selection of recent results from the ALICE Collaboration on prompt and non-prompt charm meson and baryon production in pp, p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions, as well as baryon-to-meson ratios for several charm-baryon species, will be shown. The measurements will be compared to results available from the other LHC Collaborations, as well as to model calculations with different modeling of the heavy-quark hadronisation.
