Characterization of the initial state and medium properties of heavy-ion collisions at ALICE

This report summarizes the key achievements from my "Characterization of the initial state and medium properties of heavy-ion collisions at ALICE" award. This report summarizes the key achievements from DOE award, which started February 1st 2015, and ended January 31st 2018. The award funded experimental research into relativistic heavy-ion collisions at two facilities: The ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and the STAR detector at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Relativistic heavy-ion collisions aim to create the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) is a unique state where the building blocks of nuclear matter, quarks and gluons, melt and move freely over the volume of the nucleus. It is believed that the universe temporarily existed in such a state shortly after the big bang, where the temperatures needed for this transition are roughly 100,000 times bigger than the temperature at the center of the Sun. Experimental data collected over the past decade at RHIC have provided evidence that the QGP has been created in the laboratory.