Analysis of heavy-flavour particles in ALICE with the O² analysis framework

¹ CERN
² INFN, Torino
³ INFN, Salerno
⁴ Politecnico Torino
⁵ Central China Normal University
⁶ Padua University
⁷ INFN, Bari
⁸ The University of Texas at Austin
⁹ Utrecht University
¹⁰ Darmstadt GSI

^* e-mail: vit.kucera@cern.ch

Published online: 23 August 2021

Abstract

Precise measurements of heavy-flavour hadrons down to very low p_T represent the core of the physics program of the upgraded ALICE experiment in Run 3 [1]. These physics probes are characterised by a very small signal-to-background ratio requiring very large statistics of minimum-bias events. In Run 3, ALICE is expected to collect up to 13 nb⁻¹ of lead–lead collisions, corresponding to about 1 × 10¹¹ minimum-bias events. In order to analyse this unprecedented amount of data, which is about 100 times larger than the statistics collected in Run 1 and Run 2, the ALICE collaboration is developing a complex analysis framework that aims at maximising the processing speed and data volume reduction [2]. In this paper, the strategy of reconstruction, selection, skimming, and analysis of heavy-flavour events for Run 3 will be presented. Some preliminary results on the reconstruction of charm mesons and baryons will be shown and the prospects for future developments and optimisation discussed.