ALICE Upgrade

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The main beneficiaries of this upgrade will be experimentalists and theorists working in the field of hot Quantum Chromodynamics. They will directly benefit from the new insights that will arise out of the research, made possible by this Upgrade. The results of the subsequent research will be disseminated in high impact journals, through conference talks and seminars so as to reach as wide an audience as possible. More broadly, both the technologies developed during the Upgrade and the resulting research will also be of relevance to researchers in other fields, including other areas of nuclear physics, particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Some of the hardware developments related to the Birmingham design of the original ALICE trigger subsystem have already had impact, having been adopted by another experiment at CERN. Future developments that are foreseen in this proposal will potentially have relevance to a new generation of experiments planning to run in continuous data taking mode. The ITS Upgrade project will develop MAPS technologies, an area where the UK is already considered to be a world leader. Such technologies will not only have applications for other particle detectors but are likely to have applications in the areas of medicine and security.
Another strand revolves around the public understanding of science. The research that is related to this proposal has the potential to capture the imagination and to inspire a new generation of scientists. The research programme which will arise from this Upgrade is involved in studying matter as it would have existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This aspect is relevant to the evolution of the Early Universe and the possible existence of (strange) quark matter stars. Members of the ALICE-UK collaboration have given over 70 public lectures over the past five years and been involved in many other public outreach events to school children, teachers, and members of the general public.