Heavy-flavour and jet correlation measurements with the ALICE experiment at the LHC

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is one of the four experiments at the LHC at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), which focuses on measurements of ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions.

The ALICE experiment has been extensively upgraded during the Long Shutdown 2 period of the LHC in the last few years, including the complete replacement of its Silicon Inner Tracking System with the largest all-pixel Silicon detector in the world built solely using monolithic active pixel CMOS sensors. Liverpool has played a leading role in this project during the construction, installation and commissioning phase and this will continue with its operation during the physics exploitation phase about to begin.

Data taking at the LHC (Run 3) will indeed restart shortly, including a heavy-ion run scheduled at the end of 2022. Coupled to the recent detector and accelerator upgrades, this offers unprecedented opportunities to perform new measurements to probe the deep structure of the quark-gluon plasma and constrain the properties of deconfined hot QCD matter.

With this PhD project we intend to develop and perform first high-precision measurements which correlate the production of heavy-flavour hadrons (with charm or beauty quarks) and jets in Pb-Pb collisions at ultra-relativistic energies. These collisions are topologically extremely complicated. The project will thus also involve the development and use of machine learning techniques to cope with the challenging high-density environment of these heavy-ion collisions.