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 insta
lled 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.
ALICE is the experiment dedicated to the study of the quark gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions at the CERN LHC. Improvements of ALICE sub-detectors are envisaged for the upgrade plans of year 2017. The Muon Forward Tracker (MFT) is a proposal in vi
ew of this upgrade, motivated both by the possibility to increase the physics potential of the muon spectrometer and to allow new measurements of general interest for the whole ALICE physics. In order to evaluate the feasibility of this upgrade, a detailed simulation of the MFT setup is being performed within the AliRoot framework, with emphasis on the tracking capabilities as a function of the number, position and size of the pixel planes, and the corresponding physics performances. In this report, we present preliminary results on the MFT performances in a low-multiplicity environment.
The NA60 experiment has studied low-mass muon pair production in proton-nucleus collisions with a system of Be, Cu, In, W, Pb and U targets using a 400 GeV/$c$ proton beam at the CERN SPS. The mass spectrum is well described by the superposition of t
he two-body and Dalitz decays of the light neutral mesons $eta$, $rho$, $omega$, $eta$ and $phi$. A new high-precision measurement of the electromagnetic transition form factors of the $eta$ and $omega$ mesons is presented, complemented with a measurement of the temperature parameter of the $rho$ meson in cold nuclear matter. The $pt$ spectra for the $omega$ and $phi$ mesons are extracted in the full $pt$ range accessible, up to $pt = 2$ GeV/$c$. The nuclear dependence of the production cross sections for the $eta$, $omega$ and $phi$ mesons has been investigated in terms of the power law $sigma_mathrm{pA} propto mathrm{A}^alpha$, and the $alpha$ parameter was studied as a function of $pt$.
The NA60 experiment has studied low-mass muon pairs production in proton-nucleus collisions at 400 GeV/$c$ at the CERN SPS. The mass spectrum is well described by the superposition of the two-body and Dalitz decays of the light neutral mesons $eta$,
$rho$, $omega$, $eta$ and $phi$. The large collected statistics allows to isolate the contributions due to the Dalitz decays of the $eta$ and $omega$ mesons, from which the electromagnetic transition form factors of the two mesons have been extracted. The found values agree with the previous available measurements, improving their uncertainty thanks to the higher statistics. The results thus confirm the discrepancy with the prediction of the Vector Meson Dominance model in the case of the electromagnetic form factor of the $omega$ meson.
