The UCT-CERN Research Centre

The UCT-CERN Research Centre was formally accepted by the University of Cape Town in August 2003, and was formed out of a confluence of certain research programmes within the Department of Physics. The Department of Physics at UCT has expertise in the fields of theoretical and experimental heavy-ion physics, which aims to study the properties of the so-called ``quark-gluon plasma''. This is a state of matter predicted to have existed in the earliest moments of the creation of the universe, and which is recreated in the most violent collisions between heavy nuclei in the laboratory.

As implied by the name of the Centre, there is extensive collaboration with CERN, the European Centre for Particle Physics, which is one of the most prestigious research laboratories in the world today. In particular, the UCT-CERN Research Centre has close collaboration with the next-generation ultra-relativistic heavy-ion experiment at CERN's Large Hadronic Collider (LHC), named ALICE - A Large Ion Collider Experiment. Our involvement in this project grew out of a meeting in 2001 between members of our group and the spokesperson of ALICE, Dr. Paolo Giubellino. The work done on ALICE and other large experiments worldwide, will be detailed below.

CERN and ALICE

CERN is a central facility for physics research funded mostly by 20 European nations, serving primarily universities and research institutions. It has a budget of slightly over 1 000 000 000 Swiss Francs per year and is used by some 7000 scientists -- over half the world's particle physicists -- representing 500 institutions worldwide and over 80 nationalities. Attracted by the exciting intellectual and technological environment provided by CERN, large numbers of physicists from outside Europe (mainly from USA, Russia, Japan and India) have also started using CERN and are benefiting from its unique setup. The sophisticated facilities are operated by large collaborations, typically consisting of dozens of institutes and hundreds of scientists and ALICE is no exception.

To improve communication amongst the many participating institutions, the World Wide Web (WWW) was originally developed at CERN. The data sets produced at the CERN experiments are some of the largest in the world and in order to analyse them efficiently, CERN is currently active in launching the European DataGRID project, which aims to serve as a massively-distributed data analysis facility. This GRID will operate at several hierarchical levels, known as ``Tiers''. Tier 0 will be at CERN and will be the largest and central computing tier. Tier 1 will be distributed amongst major research centres in Paris, Amsterdam, Turin, Frankfurt, Ohio and others. It will serve as a major distributed computing and data storage facility, while the next lowest tier, Tier 2 will represent the average user. Scientists working on the ALICE experiment have proposed that the UCT-CERN Research Centre become one of the nodes on the DataGRID and preliminary work has been done by local graduate students to achieve this goal.

As one of the experiments at CERN's LHC, ALICE is an international collaboration of over 1000 researchers from 70 institutes formed to study ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the highest energies ever possible -- 5 500 GeV per nucleon in the centre of mass frame. The experiment itself consists of a large number of detector components, which will track the position, energy and momentum of each of the tens of thousands of particles produced in each collision of the beam nuclei.