Heavy, i.e. charm and beauty, quarks are excellent probes of the colour-deconfined medium created in heavy-ion collisions, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Due to their large masses, they are predominantly produced in hard-scattering processes, which occur on a shorter time scale compared to the QGP formation time. Consequently, they experience the full system evolution, interacting with the medium constituents via elastic and inelastic scatterings. Low-momentum heavy quarks undergo a Brownian motion in the QGP, providing information about the diffusion properties of the QGP, while high momentum quarks loose energy via gluon radiation, performing a tomography of the medium.
The production of hadrons containing heavy quarks is also crucial to test perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics calculations in proton-proton collisions, as well as hadronisation mechanisms across different collision systems.

In the HF group at CERN we are investigating the production of hadrons containing heay quarks in proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions. We study production of charm and beauty mesons, as well as that of heavy-flavour baryons and hadrons with strange-quark content to investigate the hadronisation mechanisms. These measurements, together with more sophisticated observables, such as angular and momentum correlations or spin polarisation allow us to improve our knowledge on heavy-quark production and hadronisation, as well as on their interaction with the quark-gluon plasma.