The 7th edition of the Hard Probes conference was hosted in the beautiful Montreal, Quebec, Canada (June 27-July 3). In one of the most important heavy ion physics conferences, many new experimental and theoretical developments were presented and discussed. Among the presentations were talks by Yue-Shi Lai, Yen-Jie Lee, Ta-Wei Wang and Dragos Velicanu on CMS data, and overview talks by Doga Gulhan on jets and the strongly interacting medium and Camelia Mironov on quarkonium production in pp, pA and AA collisions.
One of the highlights for our group was shown on the very last slide of Ta-Wei Wang’s talk, presenting the first-ever reconstruction of exclusive B-meson decays in heavy-ion collisions. While the result is only a CMS “detector performance plot” at this time, it points to the exciting new possibilities for understanding heavy-quark energy loss based on the upcoming LHC Run 2 data.
