Heavy Ion Physics with the ALICE Detector at the LHC

by Jurgen Schukraft (CERN)

Thursday 7 Dec 2000, 14:15 → 15:15 Europe/Zurich

30-7- (CERN)

ALICE is a general-purpose heavy-ion detector designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter and the quark-gluon plasma in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC. With heavy ions at a centre-of-mass energy of about 5.5 TeV/nucleon, the LHC is the only machine that will reach, and even extend, the energy range probed by cosmic ray nucleus-nucleus collisions. Extrapolating from present results, all parameters relevant to the formation and study of the Quark--Gluon Plasma will be more favorable, typically by an order of magnitude compared to collisions at the SPS or RHIC. ALICE consists of a central part, which measures event-by-event hadrons, electrons and photons, and a forward spectrometer to measure muons. The talk will cover both physics and detector issues of ALICE.