ALICE 3
ALICE 3: a roadmap to exciting heavy-ion physics in LHC Runs 5 and 6.
First discussed within the ALICE collaboration and at the heavy-ion town hall meeting in 2018, an expression of interest on the follow-up to ALICE was drawn up and submitted as input to the European Strategy for Particle Physics update. At the beginning of 2020, dedicated working groups were then set up in order to work out the physics case, the physics performance, and a detector concept.
A major goal of ALICE 3 is to quantitatively understand the connection between heavy quark transport and hadronisation, e.g. by measuring beauty meson and baryon production and azimuthal asymmetries as well as azimuthal correlations between charm and anti-charm mesons and the production of multi-charm baryons. Another key area is the determination of the temperature and how particles flow in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in the early stage of the collision through measurements of real and virtual photon emission. Virtual photon emission is also sensitive to chiral symmetry restoration and, in particular, the mixing of the rho and a1 mesons at high temperatures. ALICE 3 would provide unique access to these topics and open up new possibilities in other areas too.
- Letter of intent for ALICE 3: A next generation heavy-ion experiment at the LHC
- CERN Bulletin article (8 November 2021): "ALICE 3 workshop: towards a next-generation heavy-ion experiment for the 2030s"