Mega Science Projects & Facilities
The ALICE Collaboration has built a detector optimized to study the collisions of nuclei at the ultra-relativistic energies provided by the LHC. The aim is to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at the highest energy densities reached so far in the laboratory. In such conditions, an extreme phase of matter - called the quark-gluon plasma - is formed. Indian scientists have played a significant role in the ALICE experiment, which is a dedicated experiment for search and study of Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). Hardware contributions to the ALICE detector include the Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD), the Muon Spectrometer, the MANAS chip, and Silicon pad detectors. The PMD is a fully Indian effort from conception to commissioning. The QGP research program of ALICE is on the quest to get a glimpse of how matter behaved within a few microseconds after the birth of our Universe. Indian scientists have contributed to the physics analysis, which led to the discovery of the QGP matter and its characterization.