Physik
Fachbereich 13

Prof. Dr. Alberica Toia
Institut für Kernphysik
Goethe- Universität
Max-von-Laue-Str.1
60438 Frankfurt am Main

IKF Tel.: +49 69 798 47078
GSI Tel.: +49 6159 712660

E-Mail: Alberica.Toia@cern.ch

Alberica Toia is Professor of Experimental Nuclear Physics at Goethe University Frankfurt, with a joint appointment with GSI since Octorber 2013. 
She works in the ALICE experiment at LHC (CERN) and in the CBM experiment at GSI/FAIR.

She studied in Milano, but got her Bachelor at Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, and later the Master in Milano.  She did her PhD in Giessen, working on the HADES experiment at GSI.  She was Post-Doc at Stony Brook University, working on the PHENIX experiment at
RHIC. Later she was at CERN where she joined the ALICE experiment at LHC.

Research Interest
Her main research topics are the studies of nuclear matter under the extreme conditions of temperature, density and small parton momentum
fraction reached with particle accelerators. She investigate the properties of QCD matter by studying the bulk of particle production, the interaction of heavy probes with such matter, and the therrmal radiation emitted.

Experimental Collaboration

ALICE

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is a dedicated heavy-ion detector to exploit the unique physics potential of nucleus-nucleus interactions at LHC energies (CERN). Our aim is to study the physics ofstrongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where the formation of a new phase of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, is expected. The existence of such a phase and its properties are key issues in QCD for the understanding of confinement and of chiral-symmetry restoration. For this purpose, we are carrying out a comprehensive study of the hadrons, electrons, muons and photons produced in the collision of heavy nuclei.

The ALICE group in Frankfurt is involved into the construction of the central barrel of ALICE, in particular the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) and the Transition Radiation Detector (TRD). In addition, fast and intelligent online data processing systems are needed to pick out interesting signals from a huge background of conventional events. For this purpose, a High Level Trigger (HLT) system for ALICE is being developed.

CBM

CBM (Compressed Baryonic Matter) will be the dedicated heavy-ion experiment at the future FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) complex at GSI in Darmstadt, Germany.  The goal of the CBM research program is to explore the QCD phase diagram in the region of high baryon densities using high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. This includes the study of the equation-of-state of nuclear matter at high densities, and the search for the deconfinement and chiral phase transitions. The CBM detector is designed to measure both bulk observables with large acceptance and rare diagnostic probes such as charmed particles and vector mesons decaying into lepton pairs. To meet these demands, the CBM experiment uses self-triggered detector front-ends and a data push readout architecture, organized by time stamps.

Our group is taking part in the First-Level Event Selector (FLES) to select events online with trigger-criteria that require partial or full event reconstruction within novel concept of '4D tracking', dictated by the continuous readout, in order to separate interactions even in cases where they partially overlap in time.