Feasibility study of $\Lambda_\mathrm{b}$ measurements in the semileptonic decay channel with the ALICE experiment at the LHC

This analysis looked at the feasibility of $\Lambda_\mathrm{b}$ hadron production measurements, through the semileptonic decay channel, in Pb-Pb collision data with the ALICE experiment. The study was performed in two ranges of candidate transverse momentum ($p_\mathrm{T}$): 2.0$< p_\mathrm{T}\leq$4.0 GeV/$c$ and 4.0$< p_\mathrm{T}\leq$8.0 GeV/$c$. A search was performed for topological selections which maximised the significance of predicted signal events over a background sample. After finding an optimum set of selections, the scaling of the signal significance with the number of analysed Pb-Pb events was computed. Through comparison with the number of Pb-Pb events recorded by the ALICE experiment in LHC Run 2, it was found that $\Lambda_\mathrm{b}$ measurements, using the semileptonic decay channel, are not feasible in this data set. Comparing with the projected number of Pb-Pb events collected in the combined LHC Run 3 and Run 4 data sets, it was found a measurement with 5$\sigma$ significance could be made in both $p_\mathrm{T}$ ranges. Additionally, this analysis evaluated the use of a method to compute signal and background distributions in real data. This analysis found the so called ``right sign minus wrong sign" method to be very challenging in the 2.0$< p_\mathrm{T}\leq$4.0 GeV/$c$ range and effective in the 4.0$< p_\mathrm{T}\leq$8.0 GeV/$c$ range.