Maja Kabus
supervisor: Daniel KikoĊa
ALICE is one of the 4 experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It focuses on analyzing quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in lead-lead collisions. Because of their large mass, charm quarks are produced at the early stage of the reaction, before the QGP is formed. Thus, one can use them as a probe to study the properties of the partonic matter as they interact with the QGP at all stages of its evolution.
The azimuthal correlations of charm meson and its antiparticle are sensitive to the energy loss at high transverse momenta. When low-momentum particles are considered, the correlations provide insights into the thermalization of charm quarks.
The analysis begins with the most abundant charm mesons, D0. D0 often decays into a pion and a kaon, so the selection of the particles is checked with the invariant mass distribution of π−K+ pairs. The first results on the invariant mass fit and particle yield with the converted Run 2 data are shown. The analysis code will be further prepared for the new Run 3 data by the end of the year.
Next, the implementation of other analysis tools is discussed: event mixing and particle identification. Event mixing means combining pairs of particles from different collisions to subtract the combinatorial background from the correlation calculations. Particle identification is being upgraded with machine learning techniques, such as Domain Adversarial Neural Networks (DANNs). They will improve the precision of initial D0 meson selection.