ALICE is the heavy-ion experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The experiment continuously took data during the first physics campaign of the machine from fall 2009 until early 2013, using proton and lead-ion beams. In this paper we describe the running environment and the data handling procedures, and discuss the performance of the ALICE detectors and analysis methods for various physics observables.

We show that high energy hadronic reactions which contain a rapidity gap and a hard subprocess have a specific dependence on the kinematic variables, which results in a characteristic behaviour of the survival probability of the gap. We incorporate this mechanism in a two-channel eikonal model to make an essentially parameter-free estimate of diffractive dijet production at the Tevatron, given the diffractive structure functions measured at HERA. The estimates are in surprising agreement with the measurements of the CDF collaboration. We briefly discuss the application of the model to other hard processes with rapidity gaps.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, Late

Bond-and site-diluted spin-1/2 Heisenberg and Ising ferro-and antiferromagnets in one, two and three dimensions are treated by a real-space scaling method. Critical parameters (pure transition temperature, where non-zero, and percolation concentration) and critical exponents are evaluated. The critical curves of the simple cubic spin-*diluted Heisenberg and Ising systems are also obtained and agree very well with experimental results for KMn,Mg, -,F, and Co,Zn, -,Cs,CI,.

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