Light flavour production in pp and heavy ion collisions at the LHC

High energy heavy-ion collisions are used to create in the laboratory a hot and dense deconfined medium with elementary QCD degrees of freedom: the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). Low momenta (below 2 GeV/c) light flavour hadrons (containing u,d,s quarks) are the most abundantly produced particles in a collision. The thermal properties of the QGP can be studied by measuring the spectral distribution and relative abundance of light flavour hadrons presents in the final state of the reaction. These measurements allows to perform quantitative comparisons between small systems (pp and p-A) and large systems (A-A) where the QGP is expected to form.  With its excellent particle identification capabilities, the ALICE experiment allows for the detection of the produced particles.

I’ll present how the most up-to-date ALICE results can be used to constrain the models describing particle production and discuss how these measurements can be used to characterize the evolution of the collision. Finally, I’ll highlight the perspectives for the future LHC runs.