Maja Kabus
supervisor: Daniel Kikoła, Łukasz Graczykowski
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 and proton-proton 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.
Femtoscopy is a technique to calculate particle source space-time characteristics from their correlations at low relative momenta. The correlations are also sensitive to the final-state interactions: Coulomb and strong interaction. The thesis will focus on femtoscopic correlations between charmed mesons and hadrons to quantify the parameters of their strong interactions in the final state.
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, then the correlations provide insights into the thermalization of charm quarks.
These studies require large data samples and a significant improvement in the efficiency of the charm meson reconstitution. Thus, the thesis will focus on analyzing data from ALICE Run 3 (starting in summer 2022) and necessary technical development. This novel kind of analysis, combining femtoscopy and heavy-flavor studies, will be possible only from now on with the Run 3 data-taking rate and data volume.