Highlights from ALICE

The LHC has delivered for the first time collisions of Nuclei in November 2010, at an energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon pair, which represents a jump of more than an order of magnitude over the highest energy nuclear collisions ever studied before. The high energy, the quality of the state-of-the art detectors, and the readiness of the experimental collaborations at the LHC have allowed a rich harvest of important scientific results. In fact, many of the most cited papers published about LHC results from the various experimental collaboration deal with nuclear collisions. The overall interest in the program has grown constantly form those first collisions, and now all 4 major LHC experiments include the study of Nuclear Collisions in their scientific program. In this lecture a short overview will be given of how the results from the LHC, and in particular from the ALICE experiment, have provided new insight on the properties of matter under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, analogous to the conditions present in the early phases of the evolution of the Universe. Results from both the nucleus-nucleus and the proton-nucleus runs will be presented. Finally, a very short outlook to the future of nuclear Collisions at the LHC will be given.