Identified charged hadron production in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC with the ALICE Experiment

TL;DR

This paper presents measurements of identified pion, kaon, and proton spectra in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV from the ALICE experiment, providing insights into the system's expansion and freezeout properties.

Contribution

It reports new detailed spectra of identified hadrons in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC, and discusses their implications for thermal and hydrodynamic models.

Findings

Spectra consistent with hydrodynamic expansion models

Particle ratios support thermal freezeout assumptions

Extension to flow-dependent analyses underway

Abstract

Identified particle spectra represent a crucial tool to understand the behavior of the matter created in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. The transverse momentum p_T distributions of identified hadrons contain informations about the transverse expansion of the system and constrain the freezeout properties of the matter created. The ALICE experiment has good particle identification performance over a broad p_T range. In this contribution the results for identified pions, kaons and protons in heavy-ion collisions at 2.76 TeV center-of-mass energy are presented. These results are compared with other identified particle measurements obtained by previous experiments, and discussed in terms of the thermal and hydrodynamic pictures. The status of extensions of this analysis, with the study of identified particles as a function of event-by-event flow in Pb-Pb collisions, is also discussed.