Laboratoire de physique subatomique et des technologies associées

Heavy Ion collisions at LHC : a new era

The research program on Quark-Gluon Plasma (a deconfined state of nuclear matter) is on the verge of considerably extending with the restart of lead-lead collisions at the highest energy (= 5,36 TeV). On September 26th 2023, the LHC delivered lead beams with collision rates between 2 and 6 kHz; the goal is to reach quickly rates of about 50 kHz. This data taking period will stop at the end of October. During this period of LHC Run 3, the cumulated statistics will be 10-fold that of Run 1 (2010-2013) and Run 2 (2015-2018) all together. Those data are crucial for the ALICE experiment because they will allow to reach the core of the physics program on Quark-Gluon Plasma with a better precision but, above all, new observable thanks to the upgrades installed during the last long shutdown (2018-2022).

Display of a Pb-Pb collision on September 27th with the ALICE experiment, using different detectors and among them the Muon Spectrometer, the Muon Forward Tracker and the Electromagnetic Calorimeter.

Page collaboration ALICE : https://alice.cern/
Page Plasma team @ SUBATECH : http://www-subatech.in2p3.fr/en/research/research-team/plasma/about

Subatech at EPS-HEP2023 conference

The EPS-HEP (European Physical Society - High Energy Physics) conference is a major 'high-energy' physics conference that covers a wide range of fields every 2 years, including the Standard Model and beyond, neutrinos, dark matter, gravitational waves and the physics of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The first 'face-to-face' event since the COVID crisis, it took place from 20 to 25 August in Hamburg and was attended by more than 800 participants. Pol Bernard Gossiaux, professor at IMT Atlantique and deputy director of the laboratory, was invited to give a plenary presentation on "High Energy QCD Matter Theory", available at https://webcast.desy.de/.
Subatech is delighted to be given such a high profile this summer on one of its longstanding themes.

The conference website: https://www.eps-hep2023.eu/