New measurement of Lambda-c production in Pb-Pb collisions with the Alice experiment at the LHC

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is one of the four main experiments at the LHC (CERN, Geneva), whose physics programme focuses on heavy-ion collision measurements. Under extreme conditions of temperature and/or density, hadronic matter 'melts' into a plasma of 'free' quarks and gluons - the so-called quark-gluon plasma (QGP). This was the state of the Early Universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang. To create these conditions in the laboratory, heavy ions (Pb nuclei) are accelerated and made to collide head on at unprecedented energies.
Open heavy-flavour production is one of the most valuable probes to measure properties of the dense QCD medium formed in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. Heavy quarks, once produced in the early stages of the collision, are expected to re-scatter and lose energy while traversing the surrounding matter, carrying important information on the properties of the hot medium. First preliminary measurements using the current ALICE detector have been made recently of D meson and Ac baryon production in pp, p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions, though with limited statistics and resolution.
The PhD project aims to develop an analysis strategy to extract for the first time the Ac baryon signal from the decay channel into pKn, in the high multiplicity environment of the 5 TeV Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC. This will be done while developing state-of-the-art machine learning analyses tools. The student will then estimate the necessary corrections and measure the pT-differential production cross-section of the charmed baryon and determine the systematic errors associated with this new measurement.