Abstract

At the Large Hardon Collider (LHC), in ultra-relativistic collisions of heavy ions, nuclear matter undergoes a phase transition to a state where quarks and gluons are not confined inside hadrons, the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP).

Heavy-flavour hadrons and quarkonia are considered very useful tools to study the QGP properties: they are produced in the initial hard scattering processes and they experience the full evolution of the system. While traversing the hot medium, heavy quarks lose energy and therefore they carry information on the interaction mechanisms inside the medium. Quarkonium states can be linked to the QGP temperature, since different states may dissociate at different temperatures.

In order to disentangle effects of the QGP from those caused by the cold nuclear matter, it is necessary to compare the PbPb measurements with those obtained in p-Pb and pp collisions.

A review of the experimental results from the LHC Run1 on heavy-flavour hadron and quarkonium measurements will be presented as well as a perspective for the coming years, particularly focusing on the recently started heavy-ion program at the LHCb experiment.