Title:Hot dense matter at the CERN-LHC

Speaker: André Mischke (Utrecht University)

Abstract: High-energy heavy ion collisions allow studying strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities and temperatures. Quantum Chromodynamics predicts that at such conditions normal, hadronic matter turns into a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons, which are the constituents of atomic nuclei. Matter in the early universe must have existed in this Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) state within the first microseconds after the Big Bang. Today the QGP might exist in the core of neutron stars.
After the compelling evidence for the existence of the QGP from the previous heavy-ion accelerators, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN marks the beginning of the exploration the QGP properties. An overview of recent results from heavy ions from the LHC experiments will be presented and discussed.