Speaker
Description
The majority of charm quarks are produced in the initial stages of the collision. In heavy-ion collisions, this makes final-state particles containing charm quarks ideal probes of the formed medium, its effects, and its evolution. Charmonium states are among the most important probes of the deconfined QCD matter. A complete understanding of their production and interaction with the medium created in the collision is necessary to disentangle genuine hot-matter effects from cold nuclear matter effects. Furthermore, the presence of a nuclear environment may affect the hadronisation mechanism of charm
quarks, potentially leading to an asymmetry in the production of open-charm mesons. To quantify these effects, charm-hadron production must be measured in different collision systems over a wide energy range. Fixed-target collisions at LHCb, enabled by the SMOG2 system, complement studies performed in collider mode and provide access to kinematic regions not explored by other fixed-target experiments. In Run 3, the SMOG2 system has allowed for an expanded set of targets, including H2, D2, He, CH4, O2, Ne, Ar, and Xe, the former serving as a proxy for pp collisions at √sNN = 113 GeV. Here we present the first LHCb fixed-target heavy-flavour results from Run 3 and discuss the prospects for upcoming analyses aimed at improving the precision of and extending the Run 2 results. These results highlight the unique opportunities offered by the LHCb fixed-target programme
for studying quarkonium production, open-charm hadronisation, and nuclear matter effects, advancing our understanding of QCD matter under extreme conditions.