Low mass dimuon production with the ALICE muon spectrometer

Low mass vector meson ($\rho$, $\omega$, $\phi$) production provides key information on the hot and dense state of strongly interacting matter produced in high-energy heavy ion collisions (called Quark Gluon Plasma). Strangeness enhancement is one of the possible signatures of the Quark Gluon Plasma formation and can be accessed through the measurement of $\phi$ meson production with respect to $\rho$ and $\omega$ mesons, while the measurement of the $\phi$ nuclear modification factor provides a powerful tool to probe the production dynamics and hadronization process in relativistic heavy ion collisions. Vector mesons can be detected through their decays into muon pairs with the ALICE muon spectrometer. This thesis presents the results on the measurement of the $\phi$ differential cross section, as a function of the transverse momentum, in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 2.76 TeV; the measurement of the $\phi$ yield and of the nuclear modification factor $R_{pA}$ at forward and backward rapidity, as a function of the transverse momentum, in p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 5.02 TeV; the measurement of the $\phi/(\rho+\omega)$ ratio, as well as of the $\phi$ nuclear modification factors $R_{AA}$ and $R_{CP}$, as a function of the number of participating nucleons, in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV.