Professor Marielle Chartier PhD, MInstP

For more details and news visit the ALICE Collaboration Web pages

My group currently carries out most of its research at the LHC where lead-lead heavy-ion collisions at ultra-relativistic energies produce partonic matter and the thermodynamics of the medium formed by these strongly interacting particles (the quark-gluon plasma) can be investigated.

The ALICE Collaboration is an international collaboration of approximately 2000 members from 170 institutions in 40 countries. The Liverpool group is well established in ALICE and has been a full member of the collaboration since 2014.

In partnership with STFC Daresbury Laboratory my group recently completed the construction of a significant fraction of Outer Barrel modules and staves for the upgrade of the ALICE Inner Tracking System detector (ITS2), the largest silicon pixel particle detector entirely made of MAPS, Monolithic Active Pixels Sensors (ALPIDE), totalling nearly 13 billion pixels and covering 10 m2, now operating during the LHC Run 3 data taking phase.

ALICE results, produced from proton-proton, proton-lead and lead-lead collision data collected during the first two running periods of the LHC from 2010 to 2018, have been compiled in a review paper 'The ALICE experiment - A journey through QCD'.

For more details and news visit the ePIC and EIC Web pages

My group recently joined the new ePIC international collaboration, consisting of hundreds of scientists and engineers in 171 institutions from 24 countries, to design a new experiment foreseen to be built at the future high-luminosity Electron-Ion Collider. The UK has announced a £58m investment for the EIC project.

The EIC is currently the only future collider approved for construction in the coming decades. It will collide high-energy electron beams with high-energy proton and ion beams at Brookhaven National Laboratory (USA) enabling new experiments to investigate the nature and properties of cold QCD matter e.g. in regions in the nucleon and nuclei where their structure is dominated by gluons.

For such experiments MAPS (Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors) is the only silicon technology capable of satisfying the most demanding particle vertexing and tracking requirements, relying, for example, on increased granularity and lower material budget. Our group is involved in R&D activities of new sensors designed in the 65 nm CMOS technology which will lead to the construction of the SVT detector for the ePIC experiment as well as for upgrades of the ALICE experiment (e.g. ITS3 upgrade and ALICE 3, the next generation heavy ion experiment at the LHC).

The physics case, detector requirements and concepts for the experimental program at the Electron-Ion Collider have been published in the 'EIC Yellow Report'.