Overview on heavy flavour measurements in lead-lead collisions at the CERN-LHC

Abstract

High energy collisions of heavy atomic nuclei allow to create and carefully study a high-density, colour-deconfined state of strongly-interacting matter. According to calculations from lattice Quantum-Chromodynamics, under the conditions of high energy density and temperature reached in such collisions, the phase transition to a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is expected to occur, where the colour confinement of quarks and gluons into hadrons should vanish and chiral symmetry should be restored. Heavy-flavour particles, containing charm and beauty, are unique probes of the conditions of the medium formed in nucleus-nucleus collisions at high energy. In this report recent measurements on open and hidden heavy-flavour production in lead-lead collisions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider are presented and discussed.