Heavy Flavour Measurements with ALICE

This Project focuses on the analysis of data taken with the ALICE detector in both p-p and p-Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (CERN). The ALICE Liverpool group's main activity is the use of heavy-flavour probes to understand the properties of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Heavy-flavour quarks are created in the initial stages of the collision and the temperature in the QGP is lower than that to create quark-antiquark pairs of these heavy flavours. This means that particles containing c and b quarks can act as effective probes to the evolution of the QGP. The probe of particular interest to this project is the Ac baryon, which is the lowest mass charmed baryon. The Ac baryon is not directly observed in the ALICE detectors but its decay products are. In the high-energy collisions at the LHC, there is a large amount of background contributed from random combinations of particles unrelated to the decay we want to measure. To rectify this, several advanced data analysis methods have been developed and used to extract the Ac signal from the background (with Monte Carlo and LHC Run 1 data). These methods include using standard topological cuts or a multivariate machine learning approach. This PhD project aims to utilise and further develop these current analytical methods for the analysis of data taken during Run 2 (2015-2018) at the LHC.