Insights from the ALICE quark-gluon coloured world at the LHC

摘要

Interactions among heavy ions at the CERN LHC collider recreate the state of matter as it was a few micro-seconds after the Big Bang: the Quark Gluon Coloured World (QGCW). At a centre-of-mass energy of 2.76TeV the produced QGCW reaches unprecedented temperatures, volumes and durations allowing more refined studies of its properties. Data collected during LHC Run1 (from 2010 to 2013) already provided new and sometimes unexpected results, and pointed to intriguing similarities among high multiplicity events produced in different colliding systems, namely pp, p-Pb and Pb-Pb. A comprehensive review of these results is presented, showing how heavy-ion physics is a powerful tool to shed light on QCD in such extreme conditions when multiple phase transitions should occur to go from the QGCW to our present non-coloured world.