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Abstract:The discovery by the ATLAS and CMS experiments of a new boson with mass around 125 GeV and with measured properties compatible with those of a Standard-Model Higgs boson, coupled with the absence of discoveries of phenomena beyond the Standard Model at the TeV scale, has triggered interest in ideas for future Higgs factories. A new circular e + e − collider hosted in a 80 to 100 km tunnel, TLEP, is among the most attractive solutions proposed so far. It has a clean experimental environment, produces high luminosity for top-quark, Higgs boson, W and Z studies, accommodates multiple detectors, and can reach energies up to the tt threshold and beyond. It will enable measurements of the Higgs boson properties and of Electroweak Symmetry-Breaking (EWSB) parameters with unequalled precision, offering exploration of physics beyond the Standard Model in the multi-TeV range. Moreover, being the natural precursor of the VHE-LHC, a 100 TeV hadron machine in the same tunnel, it builds up a long-term vision for particle physics. Altogether, the combination of TLEP and the VHE-LHC offers, for a great cost effectiveness, the best precision and the best search reach of all options presently on the market. This paper presents a first appraisal of the salient features of the TLEP physics potential, to serve as a baseline for a more extensive design study.

ALICE is the heavy-ion experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The experiment continuously took data during the first physics campaign of the machine from fall 2009 until early 2013, using proton and lead-ion beams. In this paper we describe the running environment and the data handling procedures, and discuss the performance of the ALICE detectors and analysis methods for various physics observables.

This publication describes the methods used to measure the centrality of inelastic Pb-Pb collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV per colliding nucleon pair with ALICE. The centrality is a key parameter in the study of the properties of QCD matter at extreme temperature and energy density, because it is directly related to the initial overlap region of the colliding nuclei. Geometrical properties of the collision, such as the number of participating nucleons and the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions, are deduced from a Glauber model with a sharp impact parameter selection and shown to be consistent with those extracted from the data. The centrality determination provides a tool to compare ALICE measurements with those of other experiments and with theoretical calculations.