ALICE at the LHC

Electromagnetic probes are excellent messengers from the hot and dense medium created in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Since leptons do not interact strongly, their spectra reflect the entire space-time evolution of the collision. The surrounding medium can lead to modifications of the dielectron production with respect to the vacuum rate. To quantify modifications in heavy-ion collisions, measurements in pp collisions serve as a reference, while the analysis of p–A collisions allows for the disentanglement of cold nuclear matter effects from those of the hot and dense medium. In this proceedings, dielectron measurements with the ALICE central barrel detectors are presented. The invariant mass distributions in the range 0 < mee < 3 GeV/c2 are compared to the expected yields from hadronic sources for pp collisions at√ s = 7 TeV, and for p–Pb collisions at sNN = 5.02 TeV. The cross section of direct photons measured via virtual photons in pp collisions is compared to predictions from NLO pQCD calculations as a function of the transverse momentum. The status of the analysis of Pb–Pb collisions at sNN = 2.76 TeV is presented