ALICE's Voyage to the Beginning of the Universe

The main objective of A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE), one of four large experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, is to recreate the density and temperature conditions which existed for a few microseconds after the formation of our universe in the Big Bang. The LHC recreates these extreme conditions by accelerating and colliding lead ions.

The theory of the strong interation predicts that matter loses structure in the resulting extremely hot and dense conditions, and behaves like an ideal gas of elementary particles called quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of matter in our universe. ALICE will enable us to learn more about this state of matter, dubbed the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP).

ALICE has been designed to detect each of the twenty-thousand plus particles which will form in the collisions of lead ions; from these the existence and nature of the QGP will be determined.

This presentation will introduce the audience to the study of the QGP at the LHC, review the performance of the ALICE detectors in the first year of operation, and discuss the results obtained in the first proton-proton collisions. If all goes according to plan at the LHC, the presentation will also present some of the very first results from the first run of lead-ion collisions, scheduled for November 2010.