Minimum Bias Measurements with ALICE at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper presents minimum bias measurements from ALICE at the LHC, including particle distributions, correlations, and identified particle production in proton-proton and lead-lead collisions up to 2010.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive set of minimum bias results from ALICE at various collision energies, including novel measurements of particle correlations and strange particle production.

Findings

Charged-particle pseudorapidity and transverse momentum distributions measured.

First results on strange particle production in Pb--Pb collisions.

Observation of Bose-Einstein correlations and antiproton-to-proton ratio.

Abstract

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is one of the seven experiments at the the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. ALICE is especially designed for heavy-ion collisions but it also operates a rich proton-proton (pp) program. ALICE has collected pp collision data at $\sqrt{s}=$ 0.9, 2.36, 2.76, and 7 TeV and lead-lead (Pb--Pb) collision data at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=$2.76 TeV. Here, we report minimum bias measurements obtained until the end of 2010: the results include measurements of charged-particle pseudorapidity, multiplicity and transverse momentum distributions. Also, the two-pion Bose-Einstein correlation and the measurement of antiproton-to-proton ratio will be discussed. Furthermore, results on the production of identified particles including strange particles will be shown as well as first results from the first Pb--Pb run at the LHC.