Speaker
Ivan Vorobyev
(Technische Universität München)
Description
In ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the LHC, hadronic matter is believed to form a new state of matter comprising deconfined quarks and gluons — the quark- gluon plasma (QGP). Electron-positron pairs are produced during all stages of such collisions and carry information unperturbed by final-state effects, thus providing us with a unique experimental tool to study the whole space-time evolution of the system. Dielectron invariant-mass distribution is very rich in physics sources, among them the thermal black-body radiation is of particular interest as it carries information about the temperature of the hot and dense system created in the collision. The dielectron continuum is also sensitive to medium modifications of the spectral function of short-lived vector mesons that are linked to the potential restoration of chiral symmetry at high temperatures. Correlated dielectron pairs from semi-leptonic charm and beauty decays provide complementary information about the heavy-quark energy loss.
In this talk we present an extensive summary of the ALICE results in pp, p–Pb and Pb–Pb collisions, including the latest analysis of Run-2 pp collisions at 13 TeV collected with a trigger on high charged-particle multiplicities. The measurements of dielectron production in minimum bias pp collisions serve as an important vacuum reference to quantify any observed modifications in heavy-ion collisions, and the studies in p–Pb collisions are used to investigate cold nuclear matter effects. Furthermore, the progress on the multivariate analysis techniques being developed in ALICE will be reported.
Primary author
Ivan Vorobyev
(Technische Universität München)
