Abstract
On November 8, 2010 the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN collided the first stable beams of heavy ions (Pb on Pb) at the centre-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV/nucleon. The LHC worked exceedingly well during its one month of operation with heavy ions, delivering about 10 μb − 1 of data, with peak luminosity reaching to \(L_{0} = 2 \times 10^{25}\,{\rm cm}^{-2}\,{\rm s}^{-1}\) towards the end of the run. Three experiments, ALICE, ATLAS and CMS, recorded their first heavy-ion data, which were analysed in a record time. The results of the multiplicity, flow, fluctuations and Bose–Einstein correlations indicate that the fireball formed in nuclear collisions at the LHC is hotter, lives longer, and expands to a larger size at freeze-out as compared to lower energies. We give an overview of these as well as new results on quarkonia and heavy flavour suppression, and jet energy loss.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the LHC Operations for providing excellent beams, and to the members of ALICE, ATLAS and CMS Collaborations for the analysis results. In particular, the author would like to express his thanks to Panos Christakoglou, Premomoy Ghosh, Paolo Giubellino, Satyajit Jena, Sanjib Muhuri, Peter Steinberg, Ermano Vercelli, and Bolek Wyslouch for their help during the preparation of the talk and the manuscript.
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NAYAK, T.K. Heavy ions: Results from the Large Hadron Collider. Pramana - J Phys 79, 719–735 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12043-012-0373-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12043-012-0373-7