The statistical model in Pb–Pb collisions at the LHC

We briefly review the predictions of the thermal model for hadron production in comparison to latest data from RHIC and extrapolate the calculations to LHC energy. Our main emphasis is to confront the model predictions with the recently released data from ALICE at the LHC. This comparison reveals an apparent anomaly for protons and anti-protons which we discuss briefly. We also demonstrate that our statistical hadronization predictions for image production agree very well with the most recent LHC data, lending support to the picture in which there is complete charmonium melting in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) followed by statistical generation of image mesons at the phase boundary.