The quest for the Quark Gluon Plasma with ALICE: overview of recent results and prospects for the future

The ALICE experiment at the LHC studies the properties of the nuclear microseconds after the Big Bang. By colliding heavy ions accelerated at the LHC, a system with almost null baryon density, temperature has high as 300-400 MeV ad energy density exceeding by a factor 10 that predicted by lattice QCD for nuclear matter to undergo a phase transition into a Plasma of Quark and Gluon (QGP), is created at central rapidity. The basic concepts to characterize the systems created in heavy ion collisions will be introduced and an overview of the ALICE results will be presented. Then the seminar would focus on the heavy flavour probes of the Quark Gluon Plasma, namely charm and beauty, which represent a frontier of the present research in this field and motivate the upgrade of the detectors in view of the 2nd phase of LHC (run3 and run4).