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On 23rd November 2009, during the early commissioning of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), two counter-rotating proton bunches were circulated for the first time concurrently in the machine, at the LHC injection energy of 450 GeV per…
The excellent particle identification capabilities of the ALICE detector, using the time projection chamber and the time-of-flight detector, allow the detection of light nuclei and anti-nuclei. Furthermore, the high tracking resolution…
At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), protons and heavy ions are accelerated to velocities close to the speed of light and collided in order to study particle interactions and give us…
The canonical effects on strangeness and light nuclei production in high energy collisions are investigated, with a particular focus on low multiplicity events observed in small collision systems at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and also…
Proton-proton (pp) collisions have been traditionally used as a baseline measurement in the search for a deconfined state of matter in heavy-ion collisions at ultrarelativistic energies. The unprecedented collision energies that are…
The production mechanism of (anti)nuclei in ultrarelativistic hadronic collisions is under debate in the scientific community. Two successful models used for the description of the experimental measurements are the statistical hadronization…
The strong interaction among hadrons has been measured in the past by scattering experiments. Although this technique has been extremely successful in providing information about the nucleon-nucleon and pion-nucleon interactions, when…
The strong electromagnetic fields surrounding the Pb-ions accelerated at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) allow two-photon and photonuclear interactions to be studied in a so far unexplored kinematic regime. Exclusive photoproduction of…
Experiments involving proton-proton collisions at energies $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 0.9, 2.76 and 7 TeV in Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have produced a vast amount of high-precision data. Here, in this work, we have chosen to analyse the two…
The physics programme of the ALICE experiment at CERN-LHC comprises besides studies of high-energy heavy-ion collisions measurements of proton-proton interactions at unprecedented energies, too. This paper focuses on the global event…
Deuterons are atomic nuclei composed of a neutron and a proton held together by the strong interaction. Unbound ensembles composed of a deuteron and a third nucleon have been investigated in the past using scattering experiments and they…
In recent years, ALICE has extensively studied the production of light (anti)(hyper)nuclei in different collision systems and center-of-mass energies. Nevertheless, the production mechanisms of light (hyper)nuclei is still unclear and under…
The first collisions of lead nuclei, delivered by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the end of 2010, at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV, marked the beginning of a new era in ultra-relativistic…
Nuclear matter under extreme conditions can be investigated in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The measurement of transverse momentum distributions and yields of identified particles is a fundamental step in understanding…
In November 2010 the ALICE experiment at CERN has collected the first Pb--Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV produced by the LHC. A first characterization of the hot and dense state of matter produced in this new energy domain…
We show that heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide a promising environment to search for new long lived particles in well-motivated New Physics scenarios. One advantage lies in the possibility to operate the main detectors with looser…
After close to 20 years of preparation, the dedicated heavy ion experiment ALICE took first data at the CERN LHC accelerator with proton collisions at the end of 2009 and with lead nuclei at the end of 2010. After a short introduction into…
This paper begins with a summary of the status of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, including the lead-ion injector chain and the plans for the first phases of commissioning and operation with colliding proton beams. In a later phase, the…
The Large Hadron Collider forward (LHCf) experiment is designed to use the LHC to verify the hadronic-interaction models used in cosmic-ray physics. Forward baryon production is one of the crucial points to understand the development of…
Deconfined strongly interacting QCD matter is produced in the laboratory at the highest energy densities in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. A selection of recent results from ALICE is presented, spanning observables from the soft sector…