Köln 2025 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 39: Invited Talks II

HK 39.1: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 13, 2025, 11:00–11:30, Kurt-Alder HS Chemie

Upgrade programme for the ALICE experiment at the LHC — •Andrea Dainese — INFN Padova, Italy

The main goal of the ALICE experiment is to determine the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), the deconfined state of strongly-interacting matter, and to discern how they arise from the underlying QCD interactions. During the second long shutdown of the LHC (LS2), the experiment has undergone a major upgrade, and a smaller-scale upgrade is in preparation for LS3 (upgrade of the inner tracking layers ITS3 and addition of a forward calorimeter FoCal).

The Collaboration has proposed a new apparatus, ALICE 3, for the LHC Runs 5-6. The detector consists of a large-acceptance pixel-based tracker, complemented by systems for hadron and lepton identification. ALICE 3 will enable novel QGP studies and open up important opportunities in other areas of QCD. The main new studies in the QGP sector focus on beauty hadrons, multi-charm baryons and charm-charm correlations, as well as on precise multi-differential measurements of dielectron emission to probe the mechanism of chiral-symmetry restoration and the time-evolution of the QGP temperature. ALICE 3 can uniquely contribute to hadronic physics, with femtoscopic studies of the interaction potentials between charm mesons and searches for nuclei with charm, and to fundamental physics, with tests of the Low theorem for ultra-soft photon emission.

The presentation covers the detector concept, the physics performance, and the status of R&D, for the LS3 upgrades and, more extensively, for ALICE 3.

Keywords: quark-gluon plasma; detector upgrades; heavy quarks; electromagnetic radiation; silicon sensors