Description

The question of how the high-temperature phase of strongly interacting matter, the quark gluon plasma, transitions into the hadronic phase at the pseudo-critical temperature is a central motivation of heavy-ion collider experiments at the RHIC and LHC facilities. This project aimed to shed light on the process of hadronization. We did this within the framework of the hadron resonance gas model to study interactions between light flavour hadrons, to understand the formation of loosely bound (anti-)(hyper-)nuclei, and to study formation of hadrons with open and hidden heavy flavour. Using data on quarkonium and heavy quark production and Drell-Yan dilepton production in pA and AA collisions, the influence of nuclear structure of parton distributions has been studied and nuclear PDFs have been determined.