ATLAS is a general-purpose particle-physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It is run by an international collaboration with about 5000 members from 180 institutions in 40 countries worldwide. It has been designed to exploit the full discovery potential and the huge range of physics opportunities that the LHC provides.

ALICE is a heavy-ion experiment, designed to study the collisions of nuclei at the ultra-relativistic energies provided by the LHC. The aim is to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at the highest energy densities reached so far in the laboratory. In such conditions, an extreme phase of matter - called the quark-gluon plasma - is formed. Our universe is thought to have been in such a primordial state for the first few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, before quarks and gluons were bound together to form protons and neutrons.