ALICE: Physics Performance Report, Volume I

ALICE is a general-purpose heavy-ion experiment designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter and the quark-gluon plasma in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC. It currently includes more than 900 physicists and senior engineers, from both nuclear and high-energy physics, from about 80 institutions in 28 countries. The experiment was approved in February 1997. The detailed design of the different detector systems has been laid down in a number of Technical Design Reports issued between mid-1998 and the end of 2001 and construction has started for most detectors. Since the last comprehensive information on detector and physics performance was published in the ALICE Technical Proposal in 1996, the detector as well as simulation, reconstruction and analysis software have undergone significant development. The Physics Performance Report (PPR) will give an updated and comprehensive summary of the current status and performance of the various ALICE subsystems, including updates to the Technical Design Reports, where appropriate, as well as a description of systems which have not been published in a Technical Design Report. The PPR will be published in two volumes. The current Volume I contains: 1. a short theoretical overview and an extensive reference list concerning the physics topics of interest to ALICE, 2. relevant experimental conditions at the LHC, 3. a short summary and update of the subsystem designs, and 4. a description of the offline framework and Monte Carlo generators. Volume II, which will be published separately, will contain detailed simulations of combined detector performance, event reconstruction, and analysis of a representative sample of relevant physics observables from global event characteristics to hard processes

Study of the transverse mass spectra of strange particles in Pb-Pb collisions at 158 a GeV/c

The NA57 experiment has collected high statistics, high purity samples of KS0 and Λ, ξ and Ω hyperons produced in Pb-Pb collisions at 158 A GeV/c. In this paper we present a study of the transverse mass spectra of these particles for a sample of events corresponding to the most central 53% of the inelastic Pb-Pb cross-section. We analyse the transverse mass distributions in the framework of the blast-wave model for the full sample and, for the first time at the SPS, as a function of the event centrality

Energy dependence of hyperon production in nucleus-nucleus collisions at SPS

A measurement of strange baryon and antibaryon production in Pb-Pb collisions has been carried out by the NA57 experiment at the CERN SPS, with 40 and 158 AGeV/c beam momentum. Results on Λ, Ξ and Ω hyperon yields at mid-rapidity in the most central 53% of Pb-Pb collisions at 40 AGeV/c are presented and compared with those obtained at higher energy, in the same collision centrality range. The Λ and Ξ- yields per unit rapidity stay roughly constant while those of Ω-, Λ̄, Ξ̄+ and Ω̄+ increase when going to the higher SPS energy. Hyperon yields at the SPS are compared with those from the STAR experiment in sNN=130 GeV Au-Au collisions at RHIC. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Results on hyperon production from NA57

The NA57 experiment has been designed to study the onset of enhanced production of strange baryons and anti-baryons in Pb-Pb collisions with respect to p-Be collisions. Results from 40 and 160 A GeV/c Pb-Pb data will be shown. The main focus is on the checks of the NA57 analysis chain

Hyperon production at the CERN SPS: Results from the NA57 experiment

New results on strange baryon and antibaryon production in Pb-Pb collisions at 40 and 160 GeV per nucleon are presented. In particular, we have increased significantly the statistics of the Χ- and Χ̄+ samples at 160 GeV per nucleon. The dependence of particle yields and spectra on collision centrality and energy of interaction is analysed

Hyperon yields in Pb-Pb collisions from the NA57 experiment

The new results on hyperon production in Pb-Pb collisions at 158 A GeV/c and 40 A GeV/c are presented

ALICE: Physics performance report, volume I

ALICE is a general-purpose heavy-ion experiment designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter and the quark-gluon plasma in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC. It currently includes more than 900 physicists and senior engineers, from both nuclear and high-energy physics, from about 80 institutions in 28 countries. The experimentwas approved in February 1997. The detailed design of the different detector systems has been laid down in a number of Technical Design Reports issued between mid-1998 and the end of 2001 and construction has started for most detectors. Since the last comprehensive information on detector and physics performance was published in the ALICE Technical Proposal in 1996, the detector as well as simulation, reconstruction and analysis software have undergone significant development. The Physics Performance Report (PPR) will give an updated and comprehensive summary of the current status and performance of the various ALICE subsystems, including updates to the Technical Design Reports, where appropriate, as well as a description of systems which have not been published in a Technical Design Report. The PPR will be published in two volumes. The currentVolume I contains: 1. a short theoretical overview and an extensive reference list concerning the physics topics of interest to ALICE, 2. relevant experimental conditions at the LHC, 3. a short summary and update of the subsystem designs, and 4. a description of the offline framework and Monte Carlo generators. Volume II, which will be published separately, will contain detailed simulations of combined detector performance, event reconstruction, and analysis of a representative sample of relevant physics observables from global event characteristics to hard processes. © 2004 IOP Publishing Ltd