Measurement of charged D$^{*+}$ meson production in Pb-Pb collisions in 60-80\% centrality with the ALICE detector at CERN
Summary
The main goal of this thesis is to calculate the nuclear modification factor R$_{\mathrm{AA}}$ for prompt D$^{*+}$ mesons in Pb-Pb data collected by the ALICE detector at CERN during the LHC run 2 at centre of mass energy $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV in 2018. The reconstruction of the D$^{*+}$ mesons was done by means of the hadronic decay channel D$^{*+}$ \rightarrow \textrm{D}$^{0}$ $\pi^{+}$ \rightarrow \textrm{K}$^{-}$ $\pi^{+}$ $\pi^{+}$ and its charge conjugate. Invariant mass, yield and the cross-section were measured in the transverse momentum interval 1 $<$ $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ $<$ 24 GeV/c. The measured $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ differential cross section was compared to a p-p baseline to calculate the R$_{\mathrm{AA}}$ which is reported in this thesis. In the $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ range 4-12 GeV/c, a moderate suppression of the R$_{\mathrm{AA}}$ can be seen implying the formation of the Quark Gluon Plasma, a state of matter predicted by Quantum Chromo Dynamics. R$_{\mathrm{AA}}$ measurements from this thesis are compared to previous measurements by the ALICE collaboration. Furthermore, the measurements are compared to theoretical models.