D-meson measurements in Pb-Pb collisions with the ALICE detector at the LHC

Heavy quarks (charm and beauty) are effective probes to investigate the properties of the hot and dense strongly-interacting medium created in heavy-ion collisions as they are produced in partonic scattering processes occurring in the early stages of the collision. Due to their long life time, they probe all the stages of the medium evolution and they interact with its constituents, losing energy via gluon radiation and elastic collisions. The measurement of the D-meson nuclear modification factor provides a key test of parton energy-loss models. These models predict that beauty quarks lose less energy than charm quarks and the latter experience less in-medium energy loss than light quarks and gluons. D-meson production was measured with ALICE in Pb–Pb collisions at √ s NN = 2.76 TeV. D mesons were reconstructed via their hadronic decays at central rapidity. We will discuss the latest results of the measurement of the D-meson nuclear modification factor as a function of transverse momentum ( p T ) and collision centrality. In addition, the measurement of the azimuthal anisotropy ( v 2 ) of charmed-meson production as a function of p T in different centrality intervals will be presented.