Starting from 3 June, the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), including ALICE, are back in action, taking data for the accelerator’s second run.
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), which studies quark-gluon plasma – the matter present in the first moments of the universe’s existence – has now improvements to most of its 19 subdetectors. One of these was the electromagnetic calorimeter, which measures the energy of the electrons, positrons and photons produced by the collisions.
Its range of detection was extended with the addition of the new di-jet calorimeter. Modules were also added to other subdetectors, and tens of kilometres of cables were replaced as part of a complete overhaul of the electrical infrastructure. In terms of computing, ALICE doubled its data-logging capacity with improvements to the trigger and data-acquisition systems carried out by the collaboration’s IT experts.
More information about the ALICE Collaboration are available here.
Stay up to date with the news from the ISS researchers who are running data quality monitoring shifts at the ALICE experiment (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) by checking this page.