The large hadron collider (LHC) under construction at CERN will deliver ion beams up to centre of mass energies of the order of 5.5 TeV per nucleon, in case of lead. If compared to the available facilities for the study of nucleusa€“nucleus collisions (SpS and RHIC), this represents a huge step forward in terms of both volume and energy density that can be attained in nuclear interactions. ALICE (a large ion collider experiment) is the only detector speci???cally designed for the physics of nuclear collisions at LHC, even though it can also study high cross-section processes occurring in protona€“proton collisions. The main goal of the experiment is to observe and study the phase transition from hadronic matter to decon???ned partonic matter (quark gluon plasma a€“ QGP). ALICE is conceived as a general-purpose detector and will address most of the phenomena related to the QGP formation at LHC energies: for this purpose, a large fraction of the hadrons, leptons and photons produced in each interaction will be measured and identi???ed.
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