This thesis provides a comprehensive view of the physics of charmed hadrons in high-energy proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions. Given their large masses, charm quarks are produced in the early stage of a heavy-ion collision and they subsequently experience the full system evolution probing the colour-deconfined medium called quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in such collisions. In this thesis, the mechanisms of charm-quark in-medium energy loss and hadronisation are discussed via the measurements of the production of charm mesons with (Ds+) and without (D+) strange-quark content in different colliding systems, using data collected by the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC. The participation of the charm quark and its possible thermalisation in the QGP are studied via measurements of azimuthal anisotropies in the production of D+ mesons. Finally, the prospects for future measurements with the upgraded ALICE experimental apparatus and with more refined machine learning techniques are presented.
High-Energy Nuclear Physics.- Open Heavy-Flavour Physics.- ALICE: A
Large Ion Collider Experiment.- D+ and D+s Reconstruction Strategy in pp,
pPb and PbPb Collisions.
Since March 2020 the author has been a research fellow at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Torino. He is one of the two coordinators of the physics analysis group of the ALICE Collaboration devoted to the measurement of charm and beauty hadrons. He obtained his Masters degree in Physics in 2016 at the Università degli Studi di Torino and his Ph.D. in February 2020 at the Politecnico di Torino. During his Ph.D. he was responsible for the software for the alignment and assembly procedures of the upgraded silicon detector of the ALICE experiment.
