At the Institute for Subatomic Physics (SAP) we conduct fundamental experimental research into the building blocks of matter and the various forces acting on them. We are part of the ALICE experiment at the CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva (Switzerland) and we closely collaborate with the Nikhef institute in Amsterdam.
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Elliptic flow of charged particles in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV
In one of the first publications of the ALICE experiment, where our institute played a leading role in the analysis, we showed that the emission of particles in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC has a characteristic anisotropy, called elliptic flow. The observation demonstrates that a thermalised, dense system is created, and the strength of the effect shows, that the matter behaves as a perfect liquid with an extremely small viscosity.