Speaker
Giuseppe Eugenio Bruno
(BA)
Description
ALICE is a multipurpose detector for high-energy nucleus-nucleus physics at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In November 2010, ALICE took its first Pb-Pb data at the centre of mass energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon pair; reference data in proton-proton collisions at the same energy and at 7 TeV were collected in 2010 and 2011. A second, higher statistics Pb-Pb run took place in Fall 2011.
This talk gives an overview of the main physics results obtained with these data. In particular, I will present results on identified charged and strange particle transverse momentum spectra, on anisotropic flow of produced particles, on open heavy flavour and quarkonia production in Pb-Pb collisions, compared to pp collisions. The first Pb-Pb results from ALICE at LHC suggest a smooth evolution of global (bulk) event characteristics from RHIC to LHC energies. They indicate that matter created in these collisions, while initially much larger and hotter, still behaves like a very strongly interacting, almost perfect liquid. On the other hand, first results from “hard probes”, namely high pt hadrons, open heavy flavour and quarkonia production, provide novelties, surprises and challenges for theory.
Primary author
Giuseppe Eugenio Bruno
(BA)
