Measurement of the nuclear modification factor for muons from charm and bottom hadrons in Pb+Pb collisions at 5.02TeV with the ATLAS detector

Abstract

Heavy-flavour hadron production provides information about the transport properties and microscopic structure of the quark–gluon plasma created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. A measurement of the muons from semileptonic decays of charm and bottom hadrons produced in Pb+Pb and ppcollisions at a nucleon–nucleon centre-of-mass energy of 5.02TeV with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider is presented. The Pb+Pb data were collected in 2015 and 2018 with sampled integrated luminosities of 208μb−1and 38μb−1, respectively, and ppdata with a sampled integrated luminosity of 1.17pb−1were collected in 2017. Muons from heavy-flavour semileptonic decays are separated from the light-flavour hadronic background using the momentum imbalance between the inner detector and muon spectrometer measurements, and muons originating from charm and bottom decays are further separated via the muon track’s transverse impact parameter. Differential yields in Pb+Pb collisions and differential cross sections in ppcollisions for such muons are measured as a function of muon transverse momentum from 4GeV to 30GeV in the absolute pseudorapidity interval |η| <2. Nuclear modification factors for charm and bottom muons are presented as a function of muon transverse momentum in intervals of Pb+Pb collision centrality. The bottom muon results are the most precise measurement of b quark nuclear modification at low transverse momentum where reconstruction of B hadrons is challenging. The measured nuclear modification factors quantify a significant suppression of the yields of muons from decays of charm and bottom hadrons, with stronger effects for muons from charm hadron decays.