Measurement of $\phi$-meson pair production in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 5.02 TeV and 7 TeV with the ALICE experiment

The Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) has been studied extensively by many experiments in the last decades. One of the first proposed signatures for its existence was the enhancement of strange and multistrange hadrons, called Strangeness Enhancement (SE). SE is the enhancement of strange and multistrange production in heavy-ion collisions with respect to pp collisions, where no hot plasma is expected to be formed. This effect is responsible for the production of an enhancement of the yield of strange and multistrange hadrons relative to pions and is more pronounced in hadrons carrying more strangeness. SE is now measured in pp collision events with a high multiplicity of charged particles in the final state. These new measurements hinting at high-density QCD phenomena happening in a class of pp collisions paved the way to a new vision where these systems were seen as a new frontier where precision measurements could be conducted to understand non-perturbative QCD phenomenology. The φ meson is then a probe of choice to study the strangeness hadronisation mechanisms and to help deepening our knowledge on the nature behind the SE phenomenon. Its hidden strangeness makes its yield only dependent on strangeness production and its phenomenological description differs significantly between models, which makes it an invaluable tool in discriminating underlying physics phenomena. The measurement of the φ-meson pairs is not only interesting in its own right, but also for its possibility to be combined with the inclusive φ-meson yield. This allows one to directly asses the second moment (variance) of the statistical distribution of φ-meson production, opening the way to new observables to compare to Monte Carlo predictions such as PYTHIA8 phenomenological model. In the last chapter an R&D work on SiPMs detectors for the ePIC experiment at the EIC collider is presented.