Abstract
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), the dedicated detector designed to study nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC, is developing rapidly. While the experimental area is being cleared of the last elements of the L3 detector, who stopped data taking at the end of 2000, the ALICE collaboration is at work for the first steps of the installation of the detector, namely the refurbishing work on the L3 magnet and the adaptation of the infrastructure.In the meantime, in the 77 laboratories of the Collaboration, thework of preparation of the detectors is changing gear: the R&D is completed on almost all elements, with some notable advances in innovative technologies, and the major detectors components have entered the production phase.Moreover the TRD, a major new detector designed to expand the ALICE capability to identify electrons, has reached the Technical Design Report stage and is now being discussed by the LHCC.The status of our understanding of the ALICE Physics potential is described in other papers in these proceedings, so I will concentrate here on a brief description of the ALICE detectors, with mention of the most recent results achieved.
Highlights
At the LHC, it will be possible to explore a radically new regime of matter, increasing by a large factor in both volume and energy density from those achieved at the SpS and at RHIC
The central detector will be embedded in large magnet with a weak field of
Some 5% correspond to the most central collisions. This low interaction rate has a crucial role in the design of the experiment, since it allows the use of slow but high–granularity detectors, like the time projection chamber (TPC) and the silicon drift detectors (SDD’s)
Summary
At the LHC, it will be possible to explore a radically new regime of matter, increasing by a large factor in both volume and energy density from those achieved at the SpS and at RHIC. The requirement of the combined capability to track and identify particles of very low up to fairly high PT , and to reconstruct the decays of hyperons and D and B mesons in an environment with predicted multiplicities up to 8000/unit rapidity, has led to a unique design, with a very different optimization from the pp experiments at LHC. It relies on very high-granularity, yet relatively slow drift detectors, a weak, very-large volume magnetic field, and on specially developed detectors for particle identification. The central detector will be embedded in large magnet with a weak field of
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