Bonn 2010 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 23: Schwerionenkollisionen und QCD Phasen III

HK 23.6: Talk

Tuesday, March 16, 2010, 18:00–18:15, HG I

Reconstruction of open charm hadrons with the ALICE experiment at the LHC — •Rosa Romita^1,3,4, Benjamin Doenigus^1,5, and Robert Grajcarek² — ¹GSI, Darmstadt, Germany — ²Heidelberg Universität, Heidelberg, Germany — ³FIAS, Darmstadt, Germany — ⁴EMMI, Darmstadt, Germany — ⁵H-QM, Darmstadt, Germany

ALICE is the dedicated LHC experiment to the identification and characterization the quark gluon plasma (QGP) in high-energy nuclear collisions at the LHC. Due to their large mass and their exclusive generation at the early collision stage, heavy quarks (charm and bottom) are ideal probes for the properties of the QGP. It is still an open question whether the baryon over meson enhancement at intermediate momentum as observed at RHIC also holds for the heavy-quark sector. The experimental signature of open charm is a secondary decay vertex displaced from the collision vertex measured with sub-millimeter precision. We report on the expected performance of ALICE in reconstructing open charm mesons, i.e. D⁰, D⁺, D_s, in various decay channels and collision systems from detailed Monte Carlo simulations. Furthermore, we present latest results on a feasibility study on reconstructing the charmed baryon decay channels Λ_c⁺→ π⁺ + K⁻ + p, Λ_c⁺→Λ + π⁺, and Λ_c⁺→ K_S⁰ + π⁺. If data becomes available, we will present first calibration results concerning reconstructed secondary decay vertices from p+p collisions at √s = 900 GeV.