Heavy-ion physics with ALICE

Abstract

The ALICE detector, expected to start operating at the Large Hadron Collider this year, was designed specifically for the study of heavy-ion collisions. In this paper we recall the main features of the apparatus and give some examples of the expected physics performance.

Small-x physics with the ALICE experiment at the CERN-LHC

“…LHC is also capable to provide light ion collisions such as Ar-Ar and as well as asymmetric collisions like p-Pb. Table 1 gives the center-of-mass energy and expected luminosity at LHC for some typical collision systems [6]. Data from p-p collisions will be quite useful for test of pQCD (perturbative QCD) as well as act as baseline measurement for heavy-ions.…”

Extracting temperature and transverse flow by fitting transverse mass spectra and HBT radii together

“…Jet is consider to be dominate of m T spectra when transverse momentum p T is larger than 2 GeV. The dominate factors of the intermediate transverse mass spectra are considered to be temperature T and transverse flow ρ [15][16][17][18][19].…”

“…Opposite to the phenomenon of transverse mass spectra, temperature and transverse flow have a positive correlation for HBT radius R s (K T ) [20]. In other words, the shapes of R s (K T ) with low temperature and low transverse flow rapidity are similar to those with high temperature and high transverse flow rapidity, so transverse mass spectra and HBT radii can be utilized together to extract temperature T and transverse flow rapidity ρ [16,17,20,23].…”

πΞcorrelations: An interweaving of resonance interaction, channel coupling, and Coulomb effects

“…Since then, measurements have been performed for different systems of both identical and nonidentical hadrons. High-statistics data sets were accumulated in heavy-ion experiments at the BNL Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, CERN Super Proton Synchrotron, and BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) accelerators [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Correlations are significantly affected by the Coulomb and/or strong final-state interaction (FSI) between outgoing particles.…”