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The Large Hadron Collider, now under contruction at the European Center for Nuclear Research, represents a unique opportunity for Heavy-Ion Physics. It will provide nuclear collisions at a center-of-mass energy 30 times higher then the present Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL, currelty the highest energy nuclear accelerator. The LHC will open for this field a new era, in which particle production will be dominated by hard processes, and the energy densities will possibly be high enough to treat the generated quark-gluon plasma as an ideal gas. While RHIC is providing a wealth of interesting data, many physicists are working hard to prepare the experiments which will run at the LHC. ALICE, A Large Ion Collider Experiment, the dedicated detector designed to study nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC, is developing rapidly: the R&D is essentially complete, and large parts of the main detectors are in production. The scientific motivations and present status of Heavy Ion Physics, can be found in the review by T. Kodama [1]. In the following, I will summarize the experimental conditions at the LHC with nuclear beams, describe the main detector components of ALICE and briefly discuss the physics program of the experiment. |
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