Perspectives of the ALICE experiment

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider, now under contruction at the European Center for Nuclear Research, represents a unique opportunity for Heavy-Ion Physics. It will provide nuclear collisions at a center-of-mass energy 30 times higher then the present Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL, currelty the highest energy nuclear accelerator. The LHC will open for this field a new era, in which particle production will be dominated by hard processes, and the energy densities will possibly be high enough to treat the generated quark-gluon plasma as an ideal gas. While RHIC is providing a wealth of interesting data, many physicists are working hard to prepare the experiments which will run at the LHC. ALICE, A Large Ion Collider Experiment, the dedicated detector designed to study nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC, is developing rapidly: the R&D is essentially complete, and large parts of the main detectors are in production. The scientific motivations and present status of Heavy Ion Physics, can be found in the review by T. Kodama [1]. In the following, I will summarize the experimental conditions at the LHC with nuclear beams, describe the main detector components of ALICE and briefly discuss the physics program of the experiment.

Study through Geant4, for Time Resolution characterization of different detectors arrays coupled with two SiPMs, as a function of: the scintillator plastic material, its volumetric dimensions and the location of the radiation emission source

“…These types of detectors are integrated with other detectors for the optimization in the identification of particles, in particles and ion collider projects such as LHC & JINR ("Large Hadron Collider" and "Joint Institute for Nuclear Research" respectively). The implementation of high resolution detectors not only transcends the field of research in particle physics, and high energies [1,2,17], they also stand out in some industrial security systems (dosimetry, spectrometry, X-rays) [7,15]; these detectors can also be found in hospitals, within some medical imaging equipment, such as X-Rays (XR), Fluoroscopy (RF), Computed Tomography (CT), Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Scanning Microscopy [5,13,14].…”