Speaker
Description
Recent highlights and future plans with ALICE at the LHC
Marielle Chartier$^1$ for the ALICE Collaboration
$^1$University of Liverpool, Oliver Lodge Laboratory, United Kingdom
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is one the four large experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), whose research programme aims at an understanding of the phase equilibria of hadronic matter at extreme energy densities. The physics pursued with ALICE addresses the nature and origin of all visible matter in the universe, and how it can be described in terms of the fundamental, non-abelian, gauge-field theory, QCD.
ALICE is designed to detect, track, and identify hadrons, electrons, muons, and photons in proton-proton, proton-lead and lead-lead collisions at ultra-relativistic energies. In such heavy-ion collisions extremely large temperatures are generated, giving rise to an extended hadronic system with extreme energy density and very low baryon density. Over more than a decade, evidence has accrued that, at the energy scale of the LHC, this hadronic system is a deconfined phase of hadronic matter, the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP).
ALICE has just undergone substantial upgrades during the second long LHC shutdown (LS2). With its excellent particle identification capability, together with its substantially improved track and vertex reconstruction, and rate of data acquisition, ALICE is now in a position to accumulate 10 nb$^{−1}$ of Pb-Pb collisions during LHC Run 3 and Run 4. The topological scope and kinematic reach of new data with jets up to p$_T$ < 120 GeV/c, together with low transverse momentum (p$_T$) heavy-flavour (charm and beauty) particles, and low-mass, low-p$_T$, di-leptons are substantially extended with the upgraded ALICE detector.
This talk will focus on some highlights of recent results from ALICE and on the performance of the LS2 upgrades, as well as on plans for the medium and longer-term future.
