Yvonne Pachmayer - Status of Heavy-Ion Physics

At high temperature and density, quantum chromodynamics predicts a new state of matter, the Quark–Gluon Plasma, in which quarks and gluons are no longer confined in hadrons. This state of matter is assumed to have existed a few microseconds after the Big Bang or might still exist today in the interior of compact stellar objects. Similar conditions can be created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions using accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. This talk will focus on the LHC heavy-ion programme, where Pb ions are accelerated to unprecedented energies, producing the Quark–Gluon Plasma at the highest temperatures and energy densities ever studied in the laboratory. This allows the properties of the Quark–Gluon Plasma to be investigated in great detail with high precision. Thus the LHC has opened a new era in heavy-ion physics. A selection of the most relevant results of heavy-ion physics at the LHC will be presented, spanning observables from the soft sector (bulk particle production and correlations) to hard probes (charm and beauty hadrons, and jets).