ALICE
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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ALICE ITS3 clears major milestone
With the R&D for the first truly cylindrical detectors based on ultra-thin, bent, wafer-scale monolithic silicon sensors, the ALICE collaboration aims at installing new vertex layers (“ITS3”) in LHC Long Shutdown 3. The envisioned setup…
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A busy time at the ALICE Control Room as preparations gear up for 2022
After three years of challenging and intense upgrade activities and installation campaigns of LHC Long Shutdown 2 [1], ALICE started global commissioning in July to embark on a new data-taking period. Upgraded detectors and their new readouts were…
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The new ALICE Fast Interaction Trigger
To reach Run 3 physics goals, ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) [1] must collect all minimum-bias data for an interaction rate (i.e., number of collisions each second) of 50 kHz for Pb–Pb and up to 1 MHz for pp collisions. This is two orders…
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The commissioning and installation of the new ALICE ITS
The Inner Tracking System (ITS) is the innermost detector of the ALICE central barrel. It consists of seven cylindrical layers all equipped with Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) named ALPIDE (ALice PIxel DEtector). The ITS allows track ing…
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LHC takes on the SMEFT challenge
The quest for new physics at the LHC is entering a new phase: the experiments are designing new strategies to target potential deviations from the Standard Model (SM) predictions in a systematic way, to complement the traditional “bump hunts” and,…
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ALICE gears up towards a rich Run 3 QCD programme
Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions, is characterised by a rich phase diagram. The elementary coloured degrees of freedom of the theory, quarks and gluons, under ordinary conditions are confined in colour-neutral hadrons…
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CERN's new open data policy supports open science
The four main LHC collaborations (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb) have unanimously endorsed a new open data policy for scientific experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was presented to the CERN Council today. The policy commits to…
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The upgraded ALICE TPC
The ALICE time projection chamber (TPC) is a big, gas-filled cylinder (with a hole in the centre to accommodate the silicon tracker), where the charge produced by ionising radiation is projected onto detectors arranged in the two endplates.…
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