The University of Malta is becoming an associate member of the Alice experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Geneva, Switzerland.
The LHC is a 27km-long circular collider that accelerates and collides proton and heavy-ion beams at world-record energies to probe the fundamental constituents of matter. Alice, short for A Large Ion Collider Experiment, is one of the particle physics detectors in LHC.
A collaboration of over 1,500 scientists from 37 countries, Alice seeks to measure the properties of particles produced from the high-energy collisions, which create temperatures 100,000 times hotter than that of the sun’s core. It is able to recreate the quark-gluon plasma that existed after the Big Bang, that will shed light on the mechanism of the strong force and how it generates the mass of ordinary matter.
As part of the events to launch this collaboration, Alice spokesman and experimental particle physicist Paolo Giubellino will give a public talk on Thursday at 6.30pm at the Aula Magna of the university’s Valletta campus.
Admission is free. To book, fill in a form found at the website below.
http://bit.ly/1LV4Io2