Anisotropic flow of the charmed D*+ meson in non-central Pb-Pb collisions at sqrtsNN = 2.76 TeV
The focus of this thesis is the measurement of the azimuthal anisotropy parameters v2 and v3 of the charmed meson D*+ and its charge conjugate D*- in the fully reconstructed decay channels D*+ -> D0 + pi+, respectively D*- -> D0 + pi- by applying the event plane method. For this measurement, lead-lead collision data from the heavy-ion run end of 2011 at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) taken by ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) was exploited. The v2 and v3 parameters were determined as a function of the transverse momentum pT of the D*+ in a range of 2 GeV/c < pT < 20 GeV/c. The measured v2 is
comparable to the v2 of unidentified charged particles, with a significance of three standard deviations for a non-zero D*+ v2 in the pT-range of 2 GeV/c < pT < 6 GeV/c if considering the statistical uncertainty only, respectively with a significance of two standard deviations if considering the combination of statistical and systematic uncertainties. The measured v3 values are of the order of v3=0.2 in the pT-range of 2 GeV/c < pT < 8 GeV/c, respectively of the order of v3=0 in the pT-range of 8 GeV/c < pT < 20 GeV/c. In both pT-ranges the statistical and systematic uncertainties of the v3 are in the range of sigma = +/-(0.2 - 0.4).