ALICE
LHC Run 3: A Marathon of Progress and Perseverance
Earlier this month, the Large Hadron Collider reached an unprecedented milestone of 100 inverse femtobarns – equivalent to 10 million billion collisions – delivered to the ATLAS and CMS experiments in 2024, with 28 days of proton-proton collisions…
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From Upgrade to Upsurge: ALICE Experiment Achieves Milestone Luminosity in Run 3
The ALICE experiment has successfully resumed physics data-taking in RUN 3 following a major upgrade of its detectors and data acquisition system during the LHC Long Shutdown 2 (LS2). While a portion of the delivered luminosity in 2022 was allocated…
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ITS3 and FoCal: Two new subdetectors to extend ALICE’s physics reach
The ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is dedicated to studying heavy ion collisions, which recreate the hottest and densest matter ever observed in a lab – the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). By studying this exotic state of matter,…
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Pushing the boundaries of monolithic CMOS sensor technologies
Silicon solid state detectors have been developed over a long time to address the challenges of particle tracking and vertexing. At the LHC, when the machine reaches its full design regime, it collides proton bunches at a rate of 40 million times…
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Ending the 2023 LHC run with heavy-ion collisions
The LHC schedule for 2023 has been revised following the emergence of a leak in mid-July. The decision was to stop the regular proton running this year and focus on the heavy ion physics that was already scheduled for the year-end. This was…
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Ultralight air-cooled mechanics for ALICE ITS3
While the new Inner Tracking System detector, ITS2, could finally start its data taking in nominal operation for the RUN3 of LHC, ALICE is already working at replacing the three innermost layers during LS3. The ITS3 (Fig.1) is a new vertex detector…
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ALICE records first heavy-ion collisions
Following an intense period of upgrades, a totally revamped ALICE experiment statred a very challenging period of commissioning with beam and data-taking during the first year of the LHC Run 3. The ALICE detector has undergone a major upgrade…
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LHC experiments restart
The LHC restarted this summer, after a period of upgrades (LS2) and is gearing up to probe new realms of physics during a third run, which will be its most powerful yet. Run 3 of the LHC will feature higher-energy particle beams and higher collision…
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ALICE Inner Tracking System is ready for data taking
The new Inner Tracking System (ITS) of the ALICE detector was installed inside the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) in spring 2021. The new ITS consists of 7 layers of monolithic pixel sensors, named ALPIDE, tiled up on linear staves of different…
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Towards a FoCal for the ALICE experiment
A new forward high-resolution calorimeter, called FoCal (Forward Calorimeter) is being planned [1,2] as one of the two upgrade projects for the ALICE experiment that are aiming for installation during the LS3 (2026-2028) for physics data taking in…
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