ALICE

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is a heavy-ion detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ring. It is designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where a phase of matter called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) forms. For part of each year the LHC provides collisions between lead ions, recreating in the laboratory conditions similar to those just after the Big Bang. Under these extreme conditions, protons and neutrons “melt”, freeing the quarks from their bonds with the gluons. The existence of GQP and its properties are key issues in the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), for understanding the phenomenon of confinement, and for a physics problem called chiral-symmetry restoration. The ALICE collaboration studies the GQP as it expands and cools, observing how it progressively gives rise to the particles that constitute the matter of our universe today. The ALICE detector is a 10,000-tonne detector - 26 m long, 16 m high, and 16 m wide and sits in a vast cavern 56 m below ground. The Collaboration counts more than 1000 scientists from over 100 physics institutes in 30 countries.

Local activities:

Salerno team is strongly involved since the birth of the experiment in the design, setup and maintenance of Time-Of-Flight detector. Several responsabilities in hardware and software (physics analysis and data taking) activities are taken by Salerno group. The group also contributes to the Silicon Pixel Detector, that is part of the Inner Tracking System.

Main equipment:

Server di calcolo, laboratorio di elettronica.

The local group:

A. De Caro, D. De Gruttola, S. De Pasquale, L. Dello Stritto, M. F. Girard, N. Funicello, T. Virgili

Local P.I.:

S. De Pasquale, depasquale@sa.infn.it