Heavy Ion Physics at the LHC

Abstract

The first Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC are little more than a year away. This paper discusses some of the exciting measurements which the experiments will be able to perform in the very first run, even with modest luminosity, and gives a very short overview of some of the most interesting ones attainable with more extended runs. The dedicated Heavy-Ion experiment ALICE, but also ATLAS and CMS, experiments optimized for p-p collisions, are ready and eager to make best use of the nuclear beams in the LHC as soon as they will be available. The main specificities of the three detectors for Heavy-Ion collisions will also be briefly addressed in this paper. I will try to show that already the first results obtainable with Heavy-Ion beams at the LHC will qualify it as a discovery machine, capable to provide fundamental new insight to our knowledge of high-density QCD matter.

Invited talk at the Hadron Collider Physics Symposium (HCP2008), Galena, Illinois, USA, May 27-31, 2008; 9 pages, .docx file

References in corpus (2)

• Charm production and in-medium QCD energy loss in nucleus-nucleus collisions with ALICE. A performance study
• The Heavy Ion Physics Program with ATLAS at the LHC

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Measurement of the centrality dependence of the charged particle pseudorapidity distribution in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Effective Field Theories of QCD for Heavy Quarkonia at Finite Temperature
• Operation and calibration of the Silicon Drift Detectors of the ALICE experiment during the 2008 cosmic ray data taking period