Speaker
Christine Nattrass
(University of Tennessee at Knoxville)
Description
The ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is optimized to study the properties of the hot, dense matter created in high energy nuclear collisions in order to improve our understanding of the properties of nuclear matter under extreme conditions. In 2009 the first proton beams were collided at the Large Hadron collider and since then data from proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 0.7, 2.76, and 7 TeV have been taken. In 2010 the first lead nuclei were collided at 2.76 TeV. Recent results from ALICE will be presented. These results are consistent with expectations based on data available at lower energies at RHIC and the SPS, indicating that the matter created in collisions at the LHC is hotter and larger than that at lower energies and behaves like a strongly interacting, nearly perfect liquid.
