Minimum-Bias and Early QCD Physics in ALICE

A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) is the dedicated heavy-ion experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In addition to its heavy-ion physics program, it also has a rich proton-proton physics program benefiting from a detector with a low momentum cut-off (pT about 50 MeV/c) and a small material budget (about 11% of a radiation length until the outer wall of the main tracking detector, the Time-Projection Chamber). ALICE has excellent means of particle identification (PID) with methods ranging from specific energy loss and time of flight to transition and Cherenkov radiation. The good primary and secondary vertex resolution allows for measurements of strangeness and heavy flavor with low backgrounds. ALICE has taken proton-proton collision data at 0.9, 2.36, and 7 TeV. In this article results of the first minimum-bias and soft-QCD measurements are presented. Inclusive pseudorapidity, multiplicity, and transverse momentum distributions are discussed as well as distributions of identified particles including strange particles. Further, results on two-pion Bose-Einstein correlations and the antiproton-to-proton ratio in collisions at the LHC are shown.Comment: Proceedings of the Hadron Collider Physics Symposium 201

Event-Shape Engineering and Muon-Hadron Correlations with ALICE

Angular correlations of two and more particles are a sensitive probe of the initial state and the transport properties of the system produced in heavy-ion collisions. Two recent results of the ALICE collaboration are presented. Event-shape engineering, a novel method, is applied to Pb-Pb collisions which splits events within the same centrality interval into classes with different average flow. The results indicate an interplay between radial and elliptic flow likely related to the initial-state eccentricity. In pp and p-Pb collisions, recent results revealed intriguing long-range correlation structures reminiscent of features observed in heavy-ion collisions. The use of forward detectors allowed to show that long-range correlation structures persist also at large rapidities in p-Pb collisions.Comment: Proceedings of the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP2015), Vienna, Austria, 22-29 July 201

Overview of ALICE Results at Quark Matter 2014

The results released by the ALICE collaboration at Quark Matter 2014 address topics from identified-particle jet fragmentation functions in pp collisions, to the search for collective signatures in p-Pb collisions to precision measurements of jet quenching with D mesons in Pb-Pb collisions. This paper gives an overview of the contributions (31 parallel talks, 2 flash talks and 80 posters) by the ALICE collaboration at Quark Matter 2014.Comment: Proceedings for ALICE overview plenary at Quark Matter 201

Measurement of jet quenching with I_CP and I_AA,Pythia in Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 2.76 TeV with ALICE

This paper discusses the measurement of I_CP and I_AA,Pythia with ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment). An away-side suppression is found expected from in-medium energy loss. Further, and unexpected, a near-side enhancement is seen which has not been reported by previous experiments at lower energies.Comment: Proceedings: Rencontres de Moriond QCD and High Energy Interactions 201