A LARGE ION COLLIDER EXPERIMENT (ALICE)

The major goal of the ALICE collaboration is to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at the highest energy densities reached so far in the laboratory. In such conditions, an extreme phase of matter called the quark-gluon plasma is formed. Our universe is thought to have been in this 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 chromodynamics (QCD), the understanding of confinement-deconfinement and chiral phase transitions. The collaboration has therefore built a dedicated detector to carry out a comprehensive study of the hadrons, electrons, muons and photons produced in collisions of heavy nuclei, as well as in proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions.