Speaker
Description
Measurements of heavy-flavour jets in pp collisions provide important tests of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) calculations. Jet substructure observables offer insight into the parton-shower evolution and the different radiation patterns of quarks and gluons arising from the different Casimir colour factors and parton masses. Comparisons between jets containing heavy-flavour baryons or heavy-flavour mesons probe heavy-quark hadronisation mechanisms and test the assumption of universality of charm-quark hadronisation across different collision systems.
In this contribution, a collection of recent ALICE measurements about heavy-flavour jets in pp collisions is presented. First, a set of observables involving charm jets identified by reconstructing $\mathrm{D^{0}}$ mesons is shown. We discuss measurements related to different choices of jet-axis definition, complemented by the generalised jet-angularity measurements for $\mathrm{D^{0}}$-tagged jets. These two measurements provide systematic insight into the radiation pattern and fragmentation of charm quarks during the parton-shower evolution. Then, we present the first measurement of the energy-energy correlator in $\mathrm{D^{0}}$-tagged jets, which resolves the angular structure of the energy flow of QCD radiation and allows for the separation of perturbative and non-perturbative regimes. Extending these studies in the charm-baryon sector, we compare the results of $\mathrm{D}$-meson jets with those of $\mathrm{\Lambda^{+}_{c}}$-tagged jets, thereby providing insight into charm-quark hadronisation mechanisms. Finally, we present the new b-jet production cross section measured with a b-jet tagging algorithm based on a graph neural network. These results provide new benchmarks for perturbative QCD calculations and establish a baseline for future b-quark energy loss studies in heavy-ion collisions.