Production and quenching studies of heavy flavour in pp, pA, AA collisions with ALICE, ATLAS, CMS

The large interest in open heavy-flavour physics in heavy-ion collisions is proven by the flourishing results obtained at both RHIC and LHC energies. Heavy quarks are produced in the early stages of heavy-ion collisions and their abundance is not expected to change throughout the evolution of the system. Hence, they behave as self-generated probes that traverse the hot and dense medium losing energy via subsequent elastic scatterings and/or gluon radiation. The four LHC experiments provide complementary measurements of heavy-flavoured particles in different kine-matical regions exploiting different experimental techniques. In these proceedings, the focus is given on the results obtained by ALICE, ATLAS and CMS in pp and AA collisions. The heavy-flavour measurements based on the exclusive reconstruction of charmed mesons, semi-leptonic decays of charm and beauty hadrons as well as beauty-tagged jets are discussed for pp and Pb-Pb collisions in different centrality ranges. In particular, the nuclear modification factor R-AA in the ALICE central barrel indicates a suppression of the yields of D mesons and electrons from heavy-flavour decays in Pb-Pb relative to binary-scaled pp collisions, in the measured momentum ranges 2-36 GeV/c and 3-18 GeV/c respectively. The same order of suppression is found for the muons from heavy-flavour decays from ATLAS at mid-rapidity and from ALICE at forward rapidities for 4<p(T)<10 GeV/c. The measurements of the suppression of beauty quarks is provided by CMS via semi-inclusive B meson decays in J/psi at central and mid-rapidity in different centrality ranges and via b-tagged jets at high p(T). A comparison of the ALICE D-meson and CMS non-prompt J/psi R-AA suggests a different suppression of charm and beauty in central collisions, predicted by mass dependent energy loss models. The measurements of the azimuthal anisotropies of heavy-flavour decay leptons and charmed mesons are also reported and they indicate a non-zero second Fourier harmonic nu(2) with a dependence on the collision centrality. The results are compared to various energy loss models. Finally, the perspectives for the analysis of the p-Pb data set collected in 2013 are discussed.