Speaker
Andrea Dainese
(INFN Padova)
Description
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will collide lead nuclei in November 2010. Three experiments will collect data during the heavy-ion run: ALICE, which is the dedicated heavy-ion experiment, ATLAS, and CMS.
After the successful commissioning and proton-proton data taking phases, these experiments will face the new challenge posed by the extreme conditions of Pb-Pb collisions, with envisaged particle production multiplicities of few thousand units.
In this presentation, I will briefly introduce the physics motivations for the LHC heavy-ion program, and then discuss the experimental conditions and the preparation of the experiments for the upcoming run with lead beams. In particular, I will describe the aspects of the ALICE design that are specifically tailored to cope with the high-multiplicity environment, and I will discuss a few examples on how the ATLAS and CMS experiments, not specifically designed for this, are expected to perform and how they will adapt to the heavy-ion environment.
Author
Andrea Dainese
(INFN Padova)
