Speaker
Description
Collisions of lead nuclei at high energy in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN provide a unique opprotunity to study the 'condensed matter physics' of quarks and gluons, the fundamental particles of the strong interaction, which are normally bound in hadrons. In these collisions, temperatures of around 10^12 K are reached, and a plasma of quarks and gluons is formed, under conditions that are comparable to those of the universe briefly after the Big Bang. I will present highlights of the experimental study of the Quark-Gluon Plasma by ALICE at the LHC, showing how we use experimental results to determine the temperature and flow fields in the collisions, as well as the transport properties of the plasma. I will briefly outline our plans for new studies of the Quark-Gluon Plasma with the recently installed detector upgrades in the ongoing Run 3 of the LHC, as well as our future plans beyond Run 3.
