It is argued that in heavy ion collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) there could be a sizable production of baryons containing two or three heavy quarks from statistical coalescence. This production mechanism is peculiar of quark gluon plasma, and the predicted rates, in heavy ion collisions at LHC energies, exceed those from a purely hadronic scenario, particularly for Xi(bc) and ...

Heavy ion collisions at relativistic energies are a unique tool for creating very hot and dense matter in a laboratory. In particular, lattice chromodynamics (lQCD) predicts a cross-over toward a new state of matter called Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) at T∼ 170 MeV for μB ∼ 0. (where T is the temperature and μB the baryonic chemical potential) [ 1]. Heavy ion collisions allow us to experimentally s...

Heavy-ion collisions will enter a new era with the start of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A first short run with proton-proton collisions at the injection energy of 0.9 TeV will be followed by a longer one with pp collisions at 10 TeV. First Pb-Pb collisions at √ sNN=5.5 TeV will take place in 2009. Three experiments (ALICE, ATLAS, and CMS) will study both pp and Pb-Pb collisions. A sel...