Measurement of beauty-strange meson production in Pb-Pb collisions at √sNN=5.02 TeV via non-prompt Ds+ mesons

The production yields of non-prompt D-s(+) smesons, namely D-s(+) smesons from beauty-hadron decays, were measured for the first time as a function of the transverse momentum (p(T)) at midrapidity (|y| < 0.5) in central and semi-central Pb-Pb collisions at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair root s(NN)= 5.02TeVwith the ALICE experiment at the LHC. The D-s(+) smesons and their charge conjugates were reconstructed from the hadronic decay channel D-s(+) -> phi pi+, with phi -> K- K+, in the 4 < pT< 36GeV/cand 2 < pT< 24GeV/cintervals for the 0-10% and 30-50% centrality classes, respectively. The measured yields of non-prompt D-s(+) smesons are compared to those of prompt D-s(+) sand non-prompt D-0 mesons by calculating the ratios of the production yields in Pb-Pb collisions and the nuclear modification factor R-AA. The ratio between the R-AA of non-prompt D-s(+) sand prompt D-s(+) smesons, and that between the R-AA of non-prompt D-s(+) sand non-prompt D-0 mesons in central Pb-Pb collisions are found to be on average higher than unity in the 4 < p(T) < 12GeV/c interval with a statistical significance of about 1.6 sigma and 1.7 sigma, respectively. The measured R-AA ratios are compared with the predictions of theoretical models of heavy-quark transport in a hydrodynamically expanding QGP that incorporate hadronisation via quark recombination. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP3.