IIHE Invited Seminar: Understanding the interaction between hadrons: latest news from ALICE

Abstract: 

The ALICE experiment (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), installed at the CERN LHC, is devoted to the study of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions of temperature and energy density. By exploiting ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, ALICE investigates the properties of the quark– gluon plasma, a deconfined state of quarks and gluons.
Thanks to a detector system optimized for excellent particle identification and precise vertex reconstruction, ALICE provides key measurements to deepen our understanding of QCD in the non- perturbative regime.
In this seminar, particular emphasis will be given to the latest ALICE measurements of matter and antimatter production, which offer unique insights into hadronization mechanisms and fundamental symmetries in high-energy nuclear collisions.
Light antinuclei can be produced in space either by collisions of high-energy cosmic rays with the interstellar medium or from the annihilation of dark matter particles stemming into standard model particles. High-energy hadronic collisions at accelerators create a suitable environment for producing light (anti)nuclei.
Recent measurements of the production of antinuclei in different colliding system and of the cross- section of nuclei-antinuclei annihilation will be discussed. Such information is essential to study the different sources of antinuclei in our Universe and to interpret any future measurement of antinuclei in space.

Short bio:

Stefania Bufalino is Full Professor at the Department of Applied Science and Technology (DISAT) of Politecnico di Torino.
She has extensive experience in experimental high-energy nuclear physics and has been actively involved in the ALICE experiment at CERN since its early phases.
Her activity encompasses both physics analysis and detector hardware development, with a focus on particle identification detectors. She currently serves as deputy Project Leader of the Time-Of-Flight (TOF) detector for the ALICE 3 experimental proposal, a next-generation heavy-ion experiment at the LHC planned for the high-luminosity era.
Her research focuses on heavy-ion collisions, particularly the production of matter and antimatter and hadronization processes under extreme conditions.