Resonance results in 7 TeV pp collisions with the ALICE detector at the LHC

Short lived hadronic resonances are a very important tool for the study of the dynamics of the matter produced in heavy-ion collisions since they should be sensitive to the medium properties such as temperature, density and expansion velocity. In particular they are sensitive to the time span between chemical and kinetic freeze-out of the hadronic phase of the fireball. The study of resonances in 7 TeV pp collisions is useful both in order to constrain QCD inspired models and to form a baseline for the production in heavy-ion collisions. The resonances $\mathrm{K}^{*0}$(892), \phiup(1020), $\Sigma(1385)^{\pm}$, $\Lambda$(1520), $\Xi$(1530) are reconstructed from their hadronic decay using data collected by the ALICE detector in pp collisions at 7 TeV. Their yields and $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ spectra are compared with Monte Carlo models such as PHOJET and different PYTHIA tunes.Comment: 4 pages, 11 figures, 16th International Conference in Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD 2012

Study of the strange resonance sigma (1385) as a tool for the analysis of the dynamics of the Quark Gluon Plasma in the ALICE experiment at LHC

2009/2010La presente tesi si basa sul lavoro da me e ettuato nell'ambito della collaborazione ALICE. L'obiettivo scientifi co principale dell'esperimento é quello di investigare le proprietà della materia fortemente interagente fino alle elevatissime densità di energia (> 10 GeV/fm^3) e temperatura (~ 0.2 GeV) che verranno fornite da LHC e che ci si aspetta caratterizzino il mezzo formato nelle collisioni tra ioni pesanti a questi regimi. Calcoli di Cromo Dinamica Quantistica (QCD) su reticolo prevedono che in tali condizioni, il confi namento dei quark in adroni privi di carica di colore scompaia e si formi un plasma di quark e gluoni, denominato Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Nelle ultime due decadi, numerose indicazioni della formazione di questo stato della materia sono state osservate negli esperimenti al CERN-SPS ( sqrt{s_{NN}} = 17.3 GeV) e al BNL-RHIC ( sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200 GeV). ALICE, quindi, grazie alle energie con cui opera e potrà operare in futuro, aprirà una porta in un regime totalmente nuovo e sinora inesplorato nel campo della sica delle interazioni forti. Il primo capitolo della tesi descrive per linee generali i fondamenti della QCD descrivendo le basi della sica del Plasma di Quark e Gluoni. Si so erma quindi nella descrizione di grandezze caratteristiche del tipo di fisica sotto esame e delle osservabili (probes) che possono testimonare la comparsa del QGP nelle collisioni fra ioni pesanti, con attenzione particolare riguardo a quelle legate alla produzione di stranezza. Vengono inoltre illustrati alcuni dei risultati principali ottenuti dagli esperimenti all'SPS e a RHIC nonché alcune delle primissime misure e ffettuate da ALICE. Nel secondo capitolo é presentata una breve descrizione della macchina LHC seguita da un'ampia panoramica delle varie componenti del rivelatore ALICE, delle rispettive prestazioni, nonché del framework di calcolo messo a punto per la gestione e l'analisi dell'enorme mole di dati prodotti dall'esperimento. Il terzo capitolo approfondisce in maniera piú specifi ca uno degli aspetti piú rilevanti della fi sica studiata da ALICE, ovvero la fi sica delle risonanze strane quale strumento per lo studio della evoluzione dinamica del QGP, in particolare durante la fase di ra reddamento. Tra le numerose risonanze strane oggetto di possibile indagine, alcuni modelli teorici conferiscono particolare rilevanza alla risonanza Sigma(1385) della quale verrano discusse le caratteristiche e gli studi che la concernono eff ettuati dall'esperimento STAR a RHIC. Il quarto capitolo entra quindi nell'ambito speci fico del lavoro svolto per questa tesi, ovvero lo studio della Sigma(1385) in ALICE, in collisioni protone-protone, nel canale di decadimento forte Lambda-pi. Verranno dapprima illustrati gli studi eff ettuati su simulazioni protone-protone all'energia di 10 TeV nel centro di massa, realizzati al ne di mettere a punto la procedura di analisi. Saranno descritte la procedura implementata per l'estrazione del segnale, la valutazione del fondo ed il fi t ai dati, nonché lo studio portato avanti per l'ottimizzazione dei tagli implementati al fine di massimizzare il rapporto segnale su rumore e la valutazione delle incertezze sistematiche. Il quinto ed ultimo capitolo illustrerà l'applicazione delle procedure descritte ai dati raccolti in collisioni protone-protone alle energie di 900 GeV e 7 TeV nel centro di massa, analisi fondamentale per il tuning dei modelli esistenti nonché come riferimento per le analisi in collisioni piombo-piombo che non rientrano nell'ambito di questa tesi. I tagli applicati sono stati quindi nuovamente ottimizzati in modo da verificare la bontà del metodo messo a punto su dati simulati e sono state valutate le incertezze sistematiche. Il capitolo termina con l'illustrazione dei risultati ottenuti. Dapprima i valori di massa e larghezza estratti dalle distribuzioni integrali in massa invariante, riscontrati in accordo con i valori riportati nel Particle Data Book; poi gli spettri di fferenziali in funzione del momento e della massa trasversi opportunamente ttati. I risultati vengono infine confrontati sia con le simulazioni prodotte alla medesima energia realizzate sulla base di diversi modelli teorici sia, in via del tutto preliminare, con i risultati ottenuti da STAR a sqrt{s} = 200 GeV.This thesis work was carried out in the context of the ALICE collaboration. The ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) experiment will study Pb-Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) until the center of mass energy per nucleon pair sqrt{s_{NN}} = 5.5 TeV, the highest ever reached. The main physics goal of the experiment is the creation and the investigation of the properties of the strongly-interacting matter in the conditions of high energy density (> 10 GeV/fm^3) and high temperatures (~ 0.2 GeV), expected to characterize the medium formed in central heavy-ion collisions at these energies. Under these conditions, according to lattice Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) calculations, quark confinement into colorless hadrons should fade and a deconfined Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) should be formed. In the past two decades, experiments at CERN-SPS ( sqrt{s_{NN} = 17.3 GeV) and BNL-RHIC ( sqrt{s_{NN} = 200 GeV) have gathered ample evidences for the formation of this state of matter. ALICE, therefore, thanks to the energies available now and in the next future, will open a door in a whole and completely unexplored new regime for the physics of the strong interactions. The first chapter of this thesis describes at a general level the cornerstones of the QCD and of the Quark-Gluon Plasma physics. Then it concentrates on the description of the main quantities related to the topics under analysis and on the so-called probes of the creation of the QGP in heavy-ion collisions. Particular attention will be put on the strangeness production related probes. Moreover some of the most important results obtained by the experiments at SPS and RHIC will be presented together with the very first measurements performed by ALICE. A very short description of the LHC machine and its features opens the second chapter followed by a wide overview of the ALICE detector and of its performances, in addiction with a description of the computing framework built for the collection and the analysis of the huge amount of data provided by the experiment. The third chapter will describe in more details one of the most relevant aspects of the physics studied by ALICE, i.e. the physics of the strange resonances as fundamental tool for the QGP dynamic evolution analysis, in particular during the freeze-out phase. Among them, some theoretical models consider much relevant the Sigma(1385). It will be described in detail, with particular attention to the studies performed on it by the STAR experiment at RHIC. The forth chapter is dedicated to this specific topic, i.e. the Sigma(1385) study at ALICE in proton-proton collisions, in the strong decay channel Lambda-pi. First of all the studies performed on simulated data at sqrt{s} = 10 TeV will be described. They were realized in order to built a dedicated analysis procedure. The implemented method for the signal extraction, background evaluation and the data fit will be described together with the optimized cuts introduced in order to find an optimal set able to maximize the signal over background ratio. Then the systematic uncertainties evaluation is presented. The application of the described procedure to the data collected in proton-proton collisions at sqrt{s} = 900 GeV and 7 TeV, is then presented in the fifth and last chapter. This analysis is crucial for the tuning of the existing models and is an important benchmark for the next lead-lead collisions analysis. A new cut optimization will be performed in order to check the consistence of the procedure built using the simulated data. The systematic uncertainties will be evaluated at both energies. The results obtained (both integral and di erential in the transverse momentum) will be shown and discussed together with a comparison with some dedicated simulations provided at the same energy with different models and with a very preliminary comparison with the STAR results at sqrt{s} = 200 GeV.XXIII Ciclo198

Implementation and use of a highly available and innovative IaaS solution: the Cloud Area Padovana

While in the business world the cloud paradigm is typically implemented purchasing resources and services from third party providers (e.g. Amazon), in the scientific environment there's usually the need of on-premises IaaS infrastructures which allow efficient usage of the hardware distributed among (and owned by) different scientific administrative domains. In addition, the requirement of open source adoption has led to the choice of products like OpenStack by many organizations. We describe a use case of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) which resulted in the implementation of a unique cloud service, called ’Cloud Area Padovana’, which encompasses resources spread over two different sites: the INFN Legnaro National Laboratories and the INFN Padova division. We describe how this IaaS has been implemented, which technologies have been adopted and how services have been configured in high-availability (HA) mode. We also discuss how identity and authorization management were implemented, adopting a widely accepted standard architecture based on SAML2 and OpenID: by leveraging the versatility of those standards the integration with authentication federations like IDEM was implemented. We also discuss some other innovative developments, such as a pluggable scheduler, implemented as an extension of the native OpenStack scheduler, which allows the allocation of resources according to a fair-share based model and which provides a persistent queuing mechanism for handling user requests that can not be immediately served. Tools, technologies, procedures used to install, configure, monitor, operate this cloud service are also discussed. Finally we present some examples that show how this IaaS infrastructure is being used

Elliptic flow of charged particles in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV

We report the first measurement of charged particle elliptic flow in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV with the ALICE detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The measurement is performed in the central pseudorapidity region (|$\eta$|<0.8) and transverse momentum range 0.2< $p_{\rm T}$< 5.0 GeV/$c$. The elliptic flow signal v$_2$, measured using the 4-particle correlation method, averaged over transverse momentum and pseudorapidity is 0.087 $\pm$ 0.002 (stat) $\pm$ 0.004 (syst) in the 40-50% centrality class. The differential elliptic flow v$_2(p_{\rm T})$ reaches a maximum of 0.2 near $p_{\rm T}$ = 3 GeV/$c$. Compared to RHIC Au-Au collisions at 200 GeV, the elliptic flow increases by about 30%. Some hydrodynamic model predictions which include viscous corrections are in agreement with the observed increase.Comment: 10 pages, 4 captioned figures, published version, figures at http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/389

Azimuthal anisotropy of charged jet production in root s(NN)=2.76 TeV Pb-Pb collisions

We present measurements of the azimuthal dependence of charged jet production in central and semi-central root s(NN) = 2.76 TeV Pb-Pb collisions with respect to the second harmonic event plane, quantified as nu(ch)(2) (jet). Jet finding is performed employing the anti-k(T) algorithm with a resolution parameter R = 0.2 using charged tracks from the ALICE tracking system. The contribution of the azimuthal anisotropy of the underlying event is taken into account event-by-event. The remaining (statistical) region-to-region fluctuations are removed on an ensemble basis by unfolding the jet spectra for different event plane orientations independently. Significant non-zero nu(ch)(2) (jet) is observed in semi-central collisions (30-50% centrality) for 20 <p(T)(ch) (jet) <90 GeV/c. The azimuthal dependence of the charged jet production is similar to the dependence observed for jets comprising both charged and neutral fragments, and compatible with measurements of the nu(2) of single charged particles at high p(T). Good agreement between the data and predictions from JEWEL, an event generator simulating parton shower evolution in the presence of a dense QCD medium, is found in semi-central collisions. (C) 2015 CERN for the benefit of the ALICE Collaboration. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Peer reviewe

Forward-central two-particle correlations in p-Pb collisions at root s(NN)=5.02 TeV

Two-particle angular correlations between trigger particles in the forward pseudorapidity range (2.5 2GeV/c. (C) 2015 CERN for the benefit of the ALICE Collaboration. Published by Elsevier B. V.Peer reviewe

Event-shape engineering for inclusive spectra and elliptic flow in Pb-Pb collisions at root(NN)-N-S=2.76 TeV

Peer reviewe

Performance of the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC

ALICE is the heavy-ion experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The experiment continuously took data during the first physics campaign of the machine from fall 2009 until early 2013, using proton and lead-ion beams. In this paper we describe the running environment and the data handling procedures, and discuss the performance of the ALICE detectors and analysis methods for various physics observables

Elliptic flow of muons from heavy-flavour hadron decays at forward rapidity in Pb-Pb collisions at root s(NN)=2.76TeV

The elliptic flow, v(2), of muons from heavy-flavour hadron decays at forward rapidity (2.5 <y <4) is measured in Pb-Pb collisions at root s(NN)= 2.76TeVwith the ALICE detector at the LHC. The scalar product, two- and four-particle Q cumulants and Lee-Yang zeros methods are used. The dependence of the v(2) of muons from heavy-flavour hadron decays on the collision centrality, in the range 0-40%, and on transverse momentum, p(T), is studied in the interval 3 <p(T)<10 GeV/c. A positive v(2) is observed with the scalar product and two-particle Q cumulants in semi-central collisions (10-20% and 20-40% centrality classes) for the p(T) interval from 3 to about 5GeV/c with a significance larger than 3 sigma, based on the combination of statistical and systematic uncertainties. The v(2) magnitude tends to decrease towards more central collisions and with increasing pT. It becomes compatible with zero in the interval 6 <p(T)<10 GeV/c. The results are compared to models describing the interaction of heavy quarks and open heavy-flavour hadrons with the high-density medium formed in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. (C) 2015 CERN for the benefit of the ALICE Collaboration. Published by Elsevier B.V.Peer reviewe