ALICE

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

LHC experiments ramp-up activities

Around the world,research centres, laboratories and universities have closed as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic — forcing an increasing number of researchers to work from home. Researchers teleworking coordinated with colleagues who had to…

New physics opportunities with heavy-ion collisions at the LHC

The LHC is the latest scientific tool in a long line of increasingly sophisticated machines built over the last 70 years to study the inner workings of our Universe and the laws governing its microscopic structure and evolution. Decades-long…

Heterogeneous computing efforts for high-energy physics experiments

Substantial improvements to the current experiments at the LHC are underway, and new experiments are being proposed or discussed at future energy-frontier accelerators to answer fundamental questions in particle physics. At future hadron colliders,…

The ALICE ITS upgrade: Pixels for quarks

Introduction ALICE, the heavy-ion dedicated experiment at the LHC, will soon have enhanced physics capabilities with a major upgrade of the detectors, data-taking and data-processing systems which will improve the precision of the extracted…

ALICE trigger system: Present and Future

The purpose of any trigger system is to select an event sample strongly enriched in physics processes of interest, while rejecting those not of interest, and to do so in such a way as to make efficient use of the available detectors. The prime…

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