ALICE Newsletter No. 377
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No.377,
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ONGOING AND UPCOMING EVENTS
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Link to the CERN News |
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European Researchers' Night: Friday 26 September 2025
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- ALICE Upgrade Week 2025: 7-10 October
- ALICE Physics Week: 3-7 Nov 2025 at CERN
- ALICE Week: 8-12 Dec 2025
NEWS and ANNOUNCEMENTS
- ALICE Calendar 2026
- "Access card at CERN: rules and good practice": Our access card is personal and plays a key role in ensuring collective security at CERN.
- "Accelerator Report: The accelerator complex, between precision repairs and future-facing studies" by Rende Steerenberg
- "Charting the Luminosity Capabilities of the CERN Large Hadron Collider with Various Nuclear Species"
- ICFA Instrumentation Prizes Nomination 2026: due on 13 October 2025
These awards are bestowed annually to recognise exceptional contributions to instrumentation that have advanced the field of particle physics. Nominations are due by 23:59 GMT on 13 October 2025.
- "A new probe of radial flow": Energy Frontier, CERN Courier Jul/Aug 2025
- Physics Forum dates in 2025:
- 1 October (extraordinary)
- 5 November (physics week at CERN)
- 3 December (extraordinary)
EVENTS OF INTEREST
- Micro-Talks, Friday 19 Sept 2025, 14:00: "#17 Mastering digital wellbeing: Take control of your online life" by Ms Alessandra Patti
- LHC Seminar, Tuesday 23 Sept 2025, 11:00: "Search for Heavy Stable Charged Particles with L1 Scouting Data at the CMS experiment" by Cecile Sarah Caillol (CERN)
- TH String Theory Seminar, Tuesday 23 Sept 2025, 14:00: "High Energy String State Scattering" by Elias Kiritsis (APC Paris, Crete U.)
- Archives, Library and Open Science events, Tuesday 23 Sept 2025, 16:00: Meet the author of "Modern Special Relativity: A Student's Guide with Discussions and Examples" by Johann Rafelski (University of Arizona)
- Theory Colloquia, Wednesday 24 Sept 2025, 14:00: "Learning about gravity from imaging supermassive black holes" by Luciano Rezzolla (Goethe University Frankfurt (DE))
- QTI Seminars, Thursday 25 Sept 2025, 10:00: "Lamb shift in heavy antiprotonic atoms" by Jonas Sommerfeldt
- BE Seminars, Friday 26 Sept 2025, 16:00: "A Novel Calibration Method for the HL-LHC Wire Positioning System Sensors" by Praneeth Sarvade
NEW PAPERS ON THE ARXIV
PAPERS IN THE COLLABORATION REVIEW
Papers currently open for comments can be inspected using the link: Paper in Collaboration Review (Open for Comments).
NEWS FROM POINT 2
- Open shift block: please contact RC (alice-rc@cern.ch)
- LHC and ALICE:
- LHC continued physics production after the situation with the retracted collimator module (due to the vacuum leak).
On Friday, an issue with an SPS compensator module caused a downtime for more than 24h. Afterwards, the production continued.
- On Thursday, a failure of the cooling tower at P2 caused a loss of the cryogenic of the LHC and of experimental cooling, which led to a trip of the ALICE dipole magnet. Detectors were not harmed. Cryogenic was recovered Thursday evening.
- On Monday, the low-field data production campaign started. During the first fill, a background component in ITS was visible, increasing the busy time for a few staves in layer 3 up to 10%.
- The background turned out not to be correlated to the IR. The origin of the background is still under investigation. In the meantime, a possibility to mitigate the background was identified by increasing the ROF length in the ITS by 50%. After a discussion with the detector and physics experts, it was decided to continue data taking with this option.As soon as 50% of the target for low field data taking is reached, we plan to swap the polarity, likely around Sunday/Monday.
- Last Friday, the MD finished after 4 days. During the last night, a vacuum leak appeared in a bellow in a secondary collimator in Pt7. During an access, the leak could be sealed, and the collimator needed to be lowered to the retracted position. During the weekend, the operation with the retracted collimator was confirmed in a campaign of loss maps and a ramp-up. On Tuesday, the machine was back to physics production at full capacity.
- A total luminosity of 30.3/pb of pp data was recorded.
- LHC continued physics production after the situation with the retracted collimator module (due to the vacuum leak).
- Current Run Manager (15-28 Sep): Mesut Arslandok
Mesut Arslandok is a research scientist at Yale University and has been an active member of the ALICE and the TPC collaborations since 2010.
His expertise lies in the performance of the TPC detector, together with his work on event-by-event fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions and searches for long-lived particles beyond the Standard Model. He has held several leadership roles within ALICE, serving as Event-by-Event Physics Analysis Group (PAG-EbyE) coordinator from 2020 to 2022 and as Correlations and Flow Physics Working Group (PWG-CF) convener from 2022 to 2024. He is currently the ALICE data and Monte Carlo production coordinator and also acts as the Long-lived Particles Working Group (LLP WG) convener within the LHC BSM working group.
Mesut has served as on-call expert for the TPC (Runs 1–3) and TRD (Run 2), and has taken on responsibilities as shift leader (Runs 2-3), ECS (Run 3) and DCS (Runs 1-2) shifter.
During his mandate, he will cover the low-field data-taking period in pp collisions.
CONFERENCES
CURRENT CONFERENCES AND SCHOOLS (starting this week)
- 53rd International Symposium on Multiparticle Dynamics (ISMD) 2025, Corfu, Greece, 21-26 September
- 6th European Nuclear Physics Conference (EuNPC2025), Caen France, 22-26 September
- 11e congresso SIF2025, Palermo, Italy, 22-26 September
- SPIN2025 26th International Symposium on Spin Physics, Qingdao (Tsingtao) China, 22-26 September
- Joint ECFA-NuPECC-APPEC Activity Workshop "Synergies between the EIC and the LHC" in Krakow, Poland, 22-24 September
- XXXV International School “Francesco Romano” on Nuclear, Subnuclear and Astroparticle Physics (ISFR2025) Monopoli (Bari, Italy), 28 September - 5 October
SPEAKING OPPORTUNITIES (events within 3 months or deadline within 1 month)
- 2025 international workshop on the high energy Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC2025) , Guangzhou, China, 6-10 November, abstract deadline 30 September
- 13th ROOT Users Workshop (ROOT 2025), Valencia, Spain, 17-21 November, abstract deadline 30 September
- 25th ZIMÁNYI WINTER WORKSHOP ON HEAVY ION PHYSICS, Budapest, Hungary, 1-5 December, abstract deadline 19 October.
Invitation for a review talk contact CC chairs - Second International Conference on the Physics of Two Infinities, Tokyo, Japan, 17-21 November, abstract deadline 31 August, parallel talks. Contact PWG, CC chairs
- MIAMI 2025 Physics Conference, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Florida, US, 12-18 Dec 2025, Invitation for a review talk + additional talks contact CC chairs
- 7th international workshop on new Photon-Detectors (PD2025) , Bologna, Italy, 3 December, abstract deadline 19 September
- Lake Louise Winter Institut, Lake Louise, Canada, 1-7 March 2026 Invitation for a review talk contact CC chairs
SCHOOLS
- EDIT 2026 Instrumentation School at CERN , 3 March, registration deadline 1 October
Upcoming major conferences
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22-27 Mar 2026 |
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18-22 May 2026 |
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31 May - 5 June 2026 |
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30 July - 5 Aug 2026 |
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JUNIOR'S CORNER
Message from Junior Representatives (Bianca, Rohaan, Sara)
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- ALICE Run 3 Analysis Resources: a collection of all resources and news that can be helpful for people engaged in the analysis of ALICE Run 3 data. This is especially beneficial for those new to the Run 3 data analysis.
- Link to all ALICE Theses
- ALICE Theses website
- Guidelines for ALICE Thesis Video: a ~3-min video summarising the key results of the PhD thesis.
- ALICE Run 3 Analysis Resources: a collection of all resources and news that can be helpful for people engaged in the analysis of ALICE Run 3 data. This is especially beneficial for those new to the Run 3 data analysis.
OUTREACH NEWS
- ALICE visits:
- Saturday 13 September 2025
- Greig City Academy, UK
- Monday 15 September 2025
- Dr. Sumit Som, Director, Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC), Kolkata, India
- colleagues’ friends, Italy, Germany
- Tuesday 16 September 2025
- Ecole des Arches, Switzerland
- Bulgarian Engineering Teacher Programme
- colleague’s friends, Greece
- Wednesday 17 September 2025
- Forge Valley School, UK
- Thursday 18 September 2025
- Agrupacio Astronomica Sabadell, Spain
- visitors from Switzerland
- Friday 19 September 2025
- University of Foggia, Italy
- Competition winners from Drama, Greece
- colleagues’ friends, Italy, Argentina
- Saturday 13 September 2025
- Recent Social Media Highlights:
- Shape-shifting collisions probe secrets of early Universe
- Special #LHC seminar on 16 September 2025
- Physics with small ions: jet quenching in Oxygen collisions at the LHC
- Geometry-driven flow in collisions of Oxygen and Neon ions at the LHC
- ALICE at Initial Stages 2025
- Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Secretary of India’s Department of Science and Technology (DST)
- Visit of His Excellency Mr. Rudy Montero Mata, Deputy Minister of Science, Technology, and Environment, Republic of Cuba
- RICH prototype for ALICE 3 tested at the PS
- ALICE Juniors Talk Brazil
- ALICE’s new management team
- ALICE Thesis Award 2025
- It's Oxygen time at the LHC
DIVERSITY
- Workshop on inclusive teamwork:
- ALICE workshop on inclusive teamwork - AM cohort: 9 and 23 Sept 2025, 09:30
- ALICE workshop on inclusive teamwork - PM cohort: 9 and 23 Sept 2025, 14:00
- ALICE workshop on inclusive teamwork - AM cohort: 9 and 23 Sept 2025, 09:30
- ALICE Diversity Office website can be accessed here. Your feedback is important. You can send us an email that will be treated confidentially by using the email address: alice-diversity-office@cern.ch or send us an anonymous message by using this form.