Erlangen 2026 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 41: Heavy-Ion Collisions and QCD Phases VII

HK 41.2: Talk

Thursday, March 19, 2026, 16:45–17:00, PHIL A 602

Performance of soft dielectron measurement in pp collisions at √s = 13.6 TeV with ALICE in Run 3 — •Belana Lubinski for the ALICE Germany collaboration — Goethe University Frankfurt

Low-mass dielectrons are an exceptional tool to deepen our understanding of strongly interacting matter produced in hadronic and nuclear collisions. As they are produced during all stages of the collision and are unaffected by the strong interaction, they keep the information of their original production mechanism. This allows dielectrons to probe even the soft regime of QCD which is often unaccessible otherwise.
At the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) at CERN, an enhancement of e⁺e⁻ pairs over the expectation from know dielectron sources had been measured at low invariant mass and small pair momenta in pp collisions at √s = 63 GeV. A similar kinematic regime can be accessed with ALICE by reducing the magnetic field of the central barrel solenoid. First results from Run 2 indicate an excess also at LHC energies, albeit with a significance of 1.6σ. With the upgrade of the ALICE detector for Run 3 much higher data-acquisition rates can be achieved increasing the event statistics by a factor of 400 compared to Run 2.
In this talk, a first look at pp collisions at √s= 13.6 TeV recorded with a reduced ALICE magnetic solenoid field will be presented and their potential to address the excess observed in Run 2 will be discussed.

Keywords: ALICE; Dielectrons; Soft Production