Perspectives for the study of charm in-medium quenchingat the LHC with ALICE

Abstract.

Charm mesons produced in nucleus-nucleus collisions are expected to be less attenuated (quenched) by the medium than hadrons containing only light quarks, since radiative energy loss of heavy quarks should be reduced by the ‘dead-cone’ effect. We start from a published energy-loss model to derive the quenching for D mesons at the LHC, introducing an approximation of the dead-cone effect and employing a Glauber-based description of the geometry of central Pb-Pb collisions to estimate the in-medium path lengths of c quarks. We show that the exclusive reconstruction of ${\rm D}^0\to{\rm K\pi}^ +$ decays in ALICE allows to measure the nuclear modification factor of the D mesons transverse momentum distribution and the D/charged hadrons ratio and, thus, to investigate the energy loss of c quarks.