Heavy ion Physics with ALICE

ALICE will study the physics of the strongly interacting matter produced in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC where the formation of the Quark Gluon Plasma is expected. The experimental setup, the capabilities of the detector, and a few selected heavy-ion topics will be presented and discussed. Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) predicts a transition from a stable state of matter formed by hadrons to a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons at sufficiently high energy density where the average distance between particles becomes so small that confinement disappears. Ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions are the way of reaching energy densities about the critical one to create this Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) in the laboratory. This should allow us to better understand the strong interaction by studying the properties of the phase transition and the hadron formation. This kind of collisions will soon take place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at CERN. Heavy ion beams will collide with a maximum center-of-mass energy of 5.5 ATeV in the case of PbPb collisions. This implies an increase on energy of about a factor of 30 with respect to the highest energy collisions that have taken place until now. As a consequence the energy density reached in these collisions is expected to be between 3 and 10 times larger.