Inclusive Heavy-Flavour Production At Central And Forward Rapidity In Xe-Xe Collisions At , Root Snn=5.44 Tev

The first measurements of the production of muons and electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays in Xe-Xe collisions at root s(NN) = 5.44 TeV, using the ALICE detector at the LHC, are reported. The measurement of the nuclear modification factor RAA is performed as a function of transverse momentum pT in several centrality classes at forward rapidity (2.5 < y < 4) and midrapidity (vertical bar y vertical bar < 0.8) for muons and electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays, respectively. A suppression by a factor up to about 2.5 compared to the binary-scaled pp reference is observed in central collisions at both central and forward rapidities. The RAA of muons from heavy-flavour hadron decays is compared to previous measurements in Pb-Pb collisions at root sNN = 5.02 TeV. When the nuclear modification factors are compared in the centrality classes 0-10% for Xe-Xe collisions and 10-20% for Pb-Pb collisions, which have similar charged-particle multiplicity density, a similar suppression, with R-AA similar to 0.4 in the p(T) interval 4 < p(T) < 8 GeV/c, is observed. The comparison of the measured R-AA values in the two collision systems brings new insights on the properties of the quark-gluon plasma by investigating the system-size and geometry dependence of medium-induced parton energy loss. The results of muons and electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays provide new constraints to model calculations. (C) 2021 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V.