Welcome to the ALICE collaboration

Our mission

Welcome to the ALICE website The ALICE Collaboration has built a dedicated detector to exploit the unique physics potential of nucleus-nucleus collisions at LHC energies. Our aim is to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at the highest energy densities reached so far in the laboratory. In such condition, an extreme phase of matter - called the quark-gluon plasma - is formed. Our universe is thought to have been in such a primordial state for the first few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The properties of such a phase are key issues for Quantum Chromo Dynamics, the understanding of confinement-deconfinement and chiral phase transitions. For this purpose, we are carrying out a comprehensive study of the hadrons, electrons, muons and photons produced in the collisions of heavy nuclei. ALICE is also studying proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions both as a comparison with nucleus-nucleus collisions and in their own right.

Latest ALICE Submission

Azimuthally-differential pion femtoscopy relative to the third harmonic event plane in Pb-Pb collisions at $\mathbf{\sqrt{\textit{s}_{_{\rm NN}}}}$ = 2.76 TeV Azimuthally-differential femtoscopic measurements, being sensitive to spatio-temporal characteristics of the source as well as to the collective velocity fields at freeze out, provide very important information on the nature and dynamics of the system evolution. While the HBT radii oscillations relative to the second harmonic event plane measured recently reflect mostly the spatial geometry of the source, model studies have shown that the HBT radii oscillations relative to the third harmonic event plane are predominantly defined by the velocity fields. In this Letter, we present the first results on azimuthally-differential pion femtoscopy relative to the third harmonic event plane as a function of the pion pair transverse momentum $k_{\rm T}$ for different collision centralities in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=2.76$ TeV. We find that the $R_{\rm side}$ and $R_{\rm out}$ radii, which characterize the pion source size in the directions perpendicular and parallel to the pion transverse momentum, oscillate in phase relative to the third harmonic event plane, similar to the results from 3+1D hydrodynamical calculations. The observed radii oscillations unambiguously signal a collective expansion and anisotropy in the velocity fields. A comparison of the measured radii oscillations with the Blast-Wave model calculations indicate that the initial state triangularity is washed-out at freeze out.	arXiv
Medium modification of the shape of small-radius jets in central Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm {NN}}} = 2.76\,\rm{TeV}$ We present the measurement of a new set of jet shape observables for track-based jets in central Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}} = 2.76$ TeV. The set of jet shapes includes the first radial moment or angularity, $g$; the momentum dispersion, $p_{\rm T}D$; and the difference between the leading and sub-leading constituent track transverse momentum, $LeSub$. These observables provide complementary information on the jet fragmentation and can constrain different aspects of the theoretical description of jet-medium interactions. The jet shapes were measured for a small resolution parameter $R = 0.2$ and were fully corrected to particle level. The observed jet shape modifications indicate that in-medium fragmentation is harder and more collimated than vacuum fragmentation as obtained by PYTHIA calculations, which were validated with the measurements of the jet shapes in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 7$ TeV. The comparison of the measured distributions to templates for quark and gluon-initiated jets indicates that in-medium fragmentation resembles that of quark jets in vacuum. We further argue that the observed modifications are not consistent with a totally coherent energy loss picture where the jet loses energy as a single colour charge, suggesting that the medium resolves the jet structure at the angular scales probed by our measurements ($R=0.2$). Furthermore, we observe that small-$R$ jets can help to isolate purely energy loss effects from other effects that contribute to the modifications of the jet shower in medium such as the correlated background or medium response.	arXiv
Neutral pion and $η$ meson production at mid-rapidity in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV Neutral pion and $\eta$ meson production in the transverse momentum range 1	arXiv
Direct photon production at low transverse momentum in proton-proton collisions at $\mathbf{\sqrt{s}=2.76}$ and 8 TeV Measurements of inclusive and direct photon production at mid-rapidity in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=2.76$ and 8 TeV are presented by the ALICE experiment at the LHC. The results are reported in transverse momentum ranges of $0.47$ GeV/$c$ is at least one $\sigma$ above unity and consistent with expectations from next-to-leading order pQCD calculations.	arXiv
$φ$ meson production at forward rapidity in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}}=2.76$ TeV $\phi$ meson measurements provide insight into strangeness production, which is one of the key observables for the hot medium formed in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. ALICE measured $\phi$ production through its decay in muon pairs in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV in the intermediate transverse momentum range $2	arXiv