Abstract
The ALICE experiment has been designed to study the properties of strongly interacting matter and characterize the quark gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions at Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The programme and performance of ALICE in the soft physics domain are described, emphasizing the novel aspects offered by the LHC. This overview is thus focused on the ‘bulk’ observables (from low to intermediate hadron measurements): global event properties, chemical composition, hadronization mechanisms, expansion dynamics (flow and particle correlations) and event-by-event fluctuations. ALICE will start with proton–proton (pp) collisions which will serve as a reference for nucleus–nucleus collisions but will also bring genuine pp physics in a new energy regime. The ALICE capabilities for this first physics are also briefly described.
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