ALICE, the heavy ion experiment at LHC

Abstract

ALICE, A Large Ion Collider Experiment, is the future Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN devoted to the physics of Quantum Chromo-thermo-dynamics. Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions (HIC) at LHC aim at the production of a plasma of quarks and gluons (QGP). This plasma is expected to be much hotter, bigger and longer than in previous HIC experiments at lower center-of-mass energies. In the ALICE experiment, the ephemeral QGP created during the first stages of the HIC will be studied by the concomitant detection of most of the probes of high temperature strongly interacting matter.