Speaker
Description
In heavy-ion collisions, heavy quarks serve as sensitive probes of the quark–gluon plasma (QGP), as they traverse and interact with the constituents of the medium throughout its entire evolution. In proton–proton (pp) collisions, the study of their production offers stringent tests of perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD) calculations and serves as an essential baseline for the interpretation of heavy-ion collision data. The azimuthal correlation of electrons and muons from heavy-flavor hadron decays is sensitive to the heavy-flavor production processes and, in heavy-ion collisions, to in-medium energy loss. Compared to electron–electron or muon–muon pairs, electron–muon pairs have the advantage of strongly suppressing backgrounds from electromagnetic processes such as Drell‒Yan production and resonance decays. The ALICE detector offers the unique opportunity of a large rapidity gap between the electron and muon acceptance regions. This feature suppresses near-side jet correlations and gives access to long-range correlations, offering new sensitivity to multiparton interactions and collective effects across collision systems of different size, from pp to Pb–Pb.
In this contribution, we present the status of the measurement of the azimuthal-correlation of heavy-flavor decay electron–muon pairs in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13.6 TeV with ALICE. Background-subtracted correlations, obtained with a data-driven method to remove misidentified hadrons, residual photonic electrons, and light-hadron decay muons, are shown in intervals of the electron transverse momentum.
