Introduction

 

ALICE - USA is a collaboration of 14 Institutions, 12 Universities, and 2 National Laboratories
proposing to join the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC.

The ALICE experiment is optimized to analyze Pb+Pb collisions at a center of mass energy per nucleon pair of 5.5 TeV. It aims to study the properties of very hot quark-gluon matter, its dynamical evolution, phenomena associated with the phase transition, rehadronization, and lastly the evolution of the hadronic final state until freeze-out. The experiment has been designed to measure a large set of observables (hadrons, leptons, and photons) over a large phase space.

The ALICE detector shown here at right consists
of two seperate spectrometers: the main, central rapidity spectrometer to measure hadrons, electrons and photons, and a forward rapidity spectrometer to measure muons. The central part comprises a large solenoidal magnet (from the L3 experiment) with ITS (Inner Tracker System), TPC, TOF, RICH and TRD (Transision Radiation Detector) to measure hadrons and eletrons, and the PHOS (PHOtons Spectrometer) (PHOS) to measure photons and electrons.

The ALICE - USA Collaboration proposes to add a large area EMCal to the experiment to extend the measured momentum range for photons and electrons and to provide a measurement of jet energy and jet fragmentation functions. Once a large area EMCal is added, ALICE will resemble a combination of the PHENIX and STAR experiments, with all of the combined capabilities of these two experiemnts, able to adddress the full range of observables in ultra relativisitic heavy ion collisions.