A Large Ion Collider Experiment(ALICE) at the Large Hadron Collider(LHC)-Outlook beyond LHC RUN2

The ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is a general purpose experiment dedicated to the study of heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A new state of matter such as a quark-glun plasma, which had to exist in the early stage of the universe, can be produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The hard probes, especially heavy hadrons containing heavy quarks produced in the initial stage of the collisions are ideal tools to study the properties of quark matter, such as the gluonic energy loss and its mechanism. Some recent results for the nuclear modification factor (RAA) of heavy flavor hadrons indicate different energy loss patterns depending on the flavor. So far about 0.1 nb of data have been collected in Pb-Pb collisions from the LHC RUN1 and are being analyzed and furthermore 10 times more data will be collected in Pb-Pb collisions at the highest energy (ECM = 5.1 TeV/u) during LHC RUN2. Accordingly, the statistical uncertainty will be dramatically reduced, thus allowing some theoretical models on the nuclear modification in hot matter to be excluded. Furthermore, for an enhanced vertex position resolution and data acquisition rate of the daughter particles that decay from such hard probes, an upgrade of the ALICE – ITS (Inner Tracking System) is already ongoing and will continue during the LHC RUN2. The new ITS is, therefore, based on the latest silicon pixel technology and is designed with a new readout system to raise the data taking rate and to reduce the pixel size and the material budget. The Korean team consisting of researchers at Pusan National University, Yonsei University and Inha University is in charge of a mass test of all (53k) silicon chips of 12.5 billion pixels and the HIC (hybrid integrated circuit) assembly as one of the 5 stations in the world.