An overview of experimental results from ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the CERN LHC: bulk properties and dynamical evolution

Abstract

The first collisions of lead nuclei, delivered by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the end of 2010, at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV, marked the beginning of a new era in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion physics. Following the Run 1 period, LHC also successfully delivered PbPb collisions at the collision energy $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV at the end of 2015. The study of the properties of the produced hot and dense strongly-interacting matter at these unprecedented energies is experimentally pursued by all four big LHC experiments, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb. This review presents selected experimental results from heavy-ion collisions delivered during the first three years of the LHC operation focusing on the bulk matter properties and the dynamical evolution of the created system. It also presents the first results from Run 2 heavy-ion data at the highest energy, as well as from the studies of the reference pp and pPb systems, which are an integral part of the heavy-ion programme.