Quark-Gluon Plasma at the LHC: studying the extreme state of QCD with heavy-ion collisions

Colloquium in Physics

  • Dipartimento di Fisica - Aula Magna
  • Colloquium

Speakers

Andrea Dainese
INFN Padova

Details

The LHC is nowadays the frontier machine for the experimental study of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), a state of strongly-interacting matter that has constituted the Universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang and that is expected to be formed in high-energy collisions of heavy nuclei. In lead-lead collisions at the LHC, an energy density larger by two orders of magnitude than that of atomic nuclei and a temperature of the order of 10^12 K are attained. Under these conditions, according to QCD calculations on the lattice, the confinement of coloured quarks and gluons into colourless hadrons vanishes. The main experimental observables for the characterisation of the QGP properties will be introduced and a selection of the results obtained by the LHC experiments will be presented.

Bio:

Andrea Dainese obtained his PhD in Physics at the University of Padua in 2003. He is a research group leader in INFN and Physics coordinator of ALICE. He is coordinating the CERN quark-gluon plasma physics studies in view of the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider and Future Circular Collider.