Lunch seminar - Plamen Petrov - Heavy-Ion Physics and the ALICE experiment at the LHC

Wednesday 25 Jun 2014, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Brussels

e.349

Heavy-ion physics has the goal of studying the state of the strongly interacting quarks and gluons under conditions of extreme temperature and energy density, where normal hadronic matter makes a transition to a phase known as the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). Such transition from deconfined quarks and gluons, the QGP, to colourless hadrons is believed to have happened a few microseconds after the Big Bang. Among the different phase transitions which have occurred in the early universe, the QCD phase transition can actually be reproduced in todays heavy-ion experiments. There have been several experimental programmes dedicated to creating the QGP in heavy-ion collisions, starting from the 1990's with fixed target experiments made at the AGS and SPS with energies up to 20 GeV per nucleon in the center of mass. The work continued at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven, USA with energies of up to 200 GeV per nucleon and recently at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland where energies of 2.76 TeV were reached. Soon collisions of heavy-ions at the unprecedented energy of 5.5 TeV will be made available at the LHC. The experimental tools and the most important results in the study of the QGP will be reviewed, including the recent measurements at the LHC from the ALICE perspective.

Slides lunch.seminar-Plamen.pdf