Events in Physics
David Evans
Location: PLT
Recreating the Big Bang with ALICE at the CERN LHC
The ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC is a general purpose heavy-ion detector designed to study the strong interaction and,in particular, a deconfined state of quarks and gluons known as the quark-gluon plasma. By colliding lead ions together, at LHC energies, extreme temperatures and densities are created, for a brief moment, recreating conditions similar to those which existed up to around ten microseconds after the Big Bang.
An introduction to the physics of the ALICE experiment and the quark-gluon plasma will be given. Selected results from lead-lead collisions in ALICE will also be presented.