Soft Probes of the Quark-Gluon Plasma with ALICE at LHC

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) should start its activity of data taking by the end of summer 2009, and will provide beams of p-p and Pb-Pb at colliding energies up to 14 TeV and 5.5 ATeV respectively. The Pb-Pb heavy-ion program aims at reaching the necessary conditions to create a deconfined state of partons, the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), whose study is one of the most exciting physics topics to be explored thanks to the possibilites offered by this new-generation accelerator. In particular, the "soft" observables related to low and intermediate pT processes, will shed light on many fundamental properties of the system, such as thermodynamic parameters, chemical composition, expansion velocity etc. The p-p collisions will be of great interest as well, since they will serve as an essential reference for heavy ions. ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is the LHC experiment dedicated to the study of the QGP. Its large acceptance and low magnetic field make it particularly suited for the study of soft phenomena. After having given an overview of this detector, I will present the main motivations and prospects for soft physics in both p-p and Pb-Pb collisions.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. Proceedings of the Lake Louise Winter Institute 200