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SYLB: Symposium Loosely-Bound States – From the Coldest to the Hottest Environments

SYLB 1: Loosely-Bound States – From the Coldest to the Hottest Environments

SYLB 1.3: Invited Talk

Monday, September 8, 2025, 12:05–12:45, ZHG104

Fragile Matter in Extreme Conditions: insights from the LHC — •Francesca Bellini — Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of Bologna and INFN, Bologna, Italy

The formation of light nuclei and hypernuclei in high-energy collisions provides a valuable probe of nuclear structure and the strong interaction in few-body quantum systems. These nuclei, though relatively well bound in nuclear terms - the deuteron has a binding energy of 2.2 MeV are remarkably fragile when produced in extreme environments. At the CERN Large Hadron Collider, temperatures exceed 100 MeV (over a trillion Kelvin), vastly surpassing nuclear binding energies and raising fundamental questions about how loosely bound states can form and survive.

Over the past decade, the LHC has delivered a wealth of high-precision data on light nuclei and their antimatter counterparts, from deuterons to alpha particles to hypertritons. These notable results define the current experimental frontier and offer an unprecedented opportunity to confront theoretical models of nuclear formation.

Key findings are discussed in the context of recent theoretical developments, in particular focusing on the statistical hadronization and coalescence models, two quantum-mechanical frameworks that describe the production of light nuclei and hypernuclei. Comparisons between data and model predictions enable us to probe the quantum structure of matter under extreme conditions and to explore how few-body nuclear systems emerge from the underlying principles of quantum chromodynamics.

Keywords: nuclei; hypernuclei; high-energy collisions; thermal model; coalescence