Probing the quark gluon plasma with light-flavour hadron measurements with the ALICE detector at the LHC.

The ultimate goal of Heavy-Ion collisions is the study of the properties of the deconfined and chirally restored medium known as the Quark-Gluon Plasma.
With the advent of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) a new energy regime was reached. Light-flavour hadrons allow the investigation of the bulk properties of the created medium.
The ALICE Experiment has excellent capabilities for the measurement of light-flavour hadrons, thanks to its extensive particle identification and the very good tracking. In this talk, after briefly reviewing the most relevant features of the ALICE detector, we will summarize results on identified light-flavour hadron production from different colliding systems. The measurements cover a large number of hadron species (from pions to multi-strange baryons and light nuclei) and extend over a very large transverse momentum region (from ~ 100 MeV/c to ~ 20 GeV/c, depending on the species). The measurements in pp collisions at √s = 900 GeV, 2.76 TeV and 7 TeV provide important constraints for QCD-inspired Monte Carlo models and serve as a baseline for measurements in nuclear collisions. The results in Pb-Pb collisions at √s_{NN} = 2.76 TeV allow the measurement of the expansion properties of the fireball, the study of parton energy loss in the hot QCD medium and of the hadronization mechanisms (such as recombination or statistical hadronization). Finally, the measurements in p-Pb collisions at at √s_{NN} = 5.02 TeV play a crucial role, as they allow investigation of the effects of ordinary nuclear matter and bridge pp and Pb-Pb results in terms of multiplicity of produced particles.

Persona di contatto:Giuseppe Bruno   This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Relatore:dott. Michele Floris (CERN)