No Arabic abstract
The ALICE experiment is dedicated to the study of the quark gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions at the CERN LHC. The Muon Forward Tracker (MFT) is under consideration by the ALICE experiment to be part of its program of detectors upgrade to be installed during the LHC Long Shutdown 2 (LS2) planned for 2018. Designed as a silicon pixel detector added in the Muon Spectrometer acceptance ($-4.0 < eta < -2.5$) upstream of the hadron absorber, the MFT will allow a drastic improvement of the measurements that are presently done with the Muon Spectrometer and, in addition, will give access to new measurements that are not possible with the present Muon Spectrometer setup. Motivations and preliminary results are discussed here, concerning the measurement of prompt and displaced charmonia, open heavy flavors, and low mass dimuons in central Pb--Pb collisions at $sqrt{s_{NN}} = 5.5$ TeV.
The muon is playing a unique role in sub-atomic physics. Studies of muon decay both determine the overall strength and establish the chiral structure of weak interactions, as well as setting extraordinary limits on charged-lepton-flavor-violating processes. Measurements of the muons anomalous magnetic moment offer singular sensitivity to the completeness of the standard model and the predictions of many speculative theories. Spectroscopy of muonium and muonic atoms gives unmatched determinations of fundamental quantities including the magnetic moment ratio $mu_mu / mu_p$, lepton mass ratio $m_{mu} / m_e$, and proton charge radius $r_p$. Also, muon capture experiments are exploring elusive features of weak interactions involving nucleons and nuclei. We will review the experimental landscape of contemporary high-precision and high-sensitivity experiments with muons. One focus is the novel methods and ingenious techniques that achieve such precision and sensitivity in recent, present, and planned experiments. Another focus is the uncommonly broad and topical range of questions in atomic, nuclear and particle physics that such experiments explore.
A precise measurement of the heavy-flavor production cross-sections in pp collisions is an essential baseline for the heavy-ion program. In addition it is a crucial test of pQCD models in the new energy regime at LHC. ALICE measures the muons from the decay of charmonium resonances and from the semileptonic decay of heavy-flavored hadrons in its forward (-4.0 $<$ $eta$ $<$ -2.5) Muon Spectrometer. We discuss the status of the detector and present results of data taken in pp collisions at $sqrt{s}$=7 TeV.
The ALICE detector has been commissioned and is ready for taking data at the Large Hadron Collider. The first proton-proton collisions are expected in 2009. This contribution describes the current status of the detector, the results of the commissioning phase and its capabilities to contribute to the understanding of both pp and PbPb collisions
Quarkonia states are expected to provide essential information on the properties of the high-density strongly-interacting system formed in the early stages of high-energy heavy-ion collisions. ALICE is the LHC experiment dedicated to the study of nucleus-nucleus collisions and can study charmonia at forward rapidity (2.5 < y < 4) via the mu+ mu- decay channel and at mid rapidity (|y| < 0.9) via the e+ e- decay channel. In both cases charmonia are measured down to zero transverse momentum. The inclusive J/psi production as a function of transverse momentum and rapidity in pp collisions at sqrt{s} = 2.76 and 7 TeV are presented. For pp collisions at sqrt{s} = 7 TeV, the inclusive J/psi production as a function of the charged particle multiplicity, the inclusive J/psi polarization at forward rapidity and the J/psi prompt to non-prompt fraction are discussed. Finally, the analysis of the inclusive J/psi production in the Pb-Pb data collected fall 2011 at a center of mass energy of sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76 TeV is presented. Results on the nuclear modification factor are then shown as a function of centrality, transverse momentum and rapidity and compared to model predictions. First results on inclusive J/psi elliptic flow are given.
The ALICE experiment has several unique features which makes it an important contributor to proton-proton physics at the LHC, in addition to its specific design goal of studying the physics of strongly interacting matter in heavy-ion collisions. The unique capabilities include its low transverse momentum (pT) acceptance, excellent vertexing, particle identification over a broad pT range and jet reconstruction. In this report, a brief review of ALICE capabilities is given for studying bulk properties of produced particles which characterize the underlying events, and the physics of heavy-flavour, quarkonia, photons, di-leptons and jets.