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.

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The ALICE Collaboration at the LHC has measured the J/ψ and ψ′ photoproduction at mid-rapidity in ultra-peripheral Pb–Pb collisions at .The charmonium is identified via its leptonic decay for events where the hadronic activity is required to be minimal. The analysis is based on an event sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 23 μb−1. The cross section for coherent and incoherent J/ψ production in the rapidity interval −0.9

We report measurements of the primary charged-particle pseudorapidity density and transverse momentum distributions in p-Pb collisions at √ s NN = 5.02 TeV and investigate their correlation with experimental observables sensitive to the centrality of the collision. Centrality classes are defined by using different event-activity estimators, i.e., charged-particle multiplicities measured in three different pseudorapidity regions as well as the energy measured at beam rapidity (zero degree). The procedures to determine the centrality, quantified by the number of participants (N part ) or the number of nucleon-nucleon binary collisions (N coll ) are described. We show that, in contrast to Pb-Pb collisions, in p-Pb collisions large multiplicity fluctuations together with the small range of participants available generate a dynamical bias in centrality classes based on particle multiplicity. We propose to use the zero-degree energy, which we expect not to introduce a dynamical bias, as an alternative event-centrality estimator. Based on zero-degree energy-centrality classes, the N part dependence of particle production is studied. Under the assumption that the multiplicity measured in the Pb-going rapidity region scales with the number of Pb participants, an approximate independence of the multiplicity per participating nucleon measured at mid-rapidity of the number of participating nucleons is observed. Furthermore, at high-p T the p-Pb spectra are found to be consistent with the pp spectra scaled by N coll for all centrality classes. Our results represent valuable input for the study of the event-activity dependence of hard probes in p-Pb collisions and, hence, help to establish baselines for the interpretation of the Pb-Pb data.

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