Abstract
A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) is one of the four large experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the accelerator built at CERN where protons and Pb ions are accelerated to the highest energies ever reached. This chapter is devoted to the description of ALICE, which is the experiment dedicated to the study of the Quark-Gluon Plasma. In Sect. 3.1 the LHC main features are introduced, together with some parameters of the proton and heavy-ion beams that are relevant for the study presented in this thesis. An overview of the ALICE setup is given in Sect. 3.2, focusing on the detectors that are used for the reconstruction of D meson decays. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 are devoted to the description of the ALICE tracking strategy and of the particle identification signals and techniques which allow to deal with the extremely-high multiplicity environment of Pb–Pb collisions. In Sect. 3.5 one of the most important variables for the reconstruction of heavy-flavour particles, the track impact parameter, is described.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
The emittance measures the average spread of particle coordinates in position and momentum phase space. A low emittance particle beam is a beam where the particles are confined to a small distance and have nearly the same momentum. The emittance is inversely proportional to the beam momentum: increasing the momentum of the beam reduces the emittance and hence the physical size of the beam. It is often more useful to consider the normalized emittance \(\epsilon _n=\beta \gamma \epsilon \), which does not change as a function of energy.
- 2.
The amplitude function \(\beta (z)\) describes the single-particle motion and determines the variation of the beam envelope as a function of the coordinate along the the beam orbit, z. \(\beta ^*\) denotes the value of the beta function at the interaction point.
- 3.
Tracklets are defined as the lines which connect a pair of clusters, one cluster in each SPD layer.
- 4.
The interaction region, or beam size, is defined as the convolution of the two particles distributions in the two colliding bunches: the interaction vertex lies in a luminous region with dimensions \(\sigma _q^\mathrm{lumi~reg}=\sigma _q^\mathrm{beam}/\sqrt{2}\) with \(q=x,y,z\).
References
ATLAS Collaboration, G. Aad et al., Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Phys. Lett. B 716, 1–29 (2012). http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7214
CMS Collaboration, S. Chatrchyan et al., Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC. Phys. Lett. B 716, 30–61 (2012). http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7235
L. Evans, P. Bryant, LHC machine. J. Instrum. 3(08), S08001 (2008)
LHC Physics Centre at CERN. http://lpcc.web.cern.ch/LPCC/
ALICE Collaboration, K. Aamodt et al., The ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC. J. Instrum. 3(08), S08002 (2008)
R. Fruhwirth, Application of Kalman filtering to track and vertex fitting. Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res. Sect. A: Accel Spectrom. Detect. Assoc. Equip. 262(2–3), 444–450 (1987)
ALICE Collaboration, B. Abelev et al., Performance of the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC. Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 29, 1430044 (2014). http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.4476
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Festanti, A. (2016). The ALICE Experiment at the LHC. In: Measurement of the D0 Meson Production in Pb–Pb and p–Pb Collisions. Springer Theses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43455-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43455-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-43454-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-43455-1
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)