Following a history of cooperation with CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) since 1999, the University of Malta is becoming an associate member of the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.
To reserve a place send an email to Dr Gianluca Valentino.
Public talk by Dr Paolo Giubellino - ALICE spokesperson and experimental particle physicist
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a state-of-the-art 27-km long circular collider located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC accelerates and collides proton and heavy-ion beams at world-record energies to probe into the fundamental constituents of matter. It has allowed physicists to confirm the existence of the predicted Higgs boson, the last missing puzzle piece of the standard model, for which the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded in 2013.
A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) is one of the particle physics detectors in LHC. A collaboration of over 1500 scientists from 37 countries around the world, it has been designed to measure the properties of particles produced from the high-energy collisions, which create temperatures almost 100,000 times hotter than the temperature of the Sun’s core. It is able to recreate the quark-gluon plasma that existed in the few microseconds after the start of the Big Bang, which will shed light on the mechanism of the strong force and how it results in generating the bulk of the mass of ordinary matter. Almost 100 terabytes of data (20,000 DVDs) are generated per day, which require the latest high-performance computing technology such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid to process and analyse the data.