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The Norwegian ALICE groups are deeply involved in the design and development of both hardware and software for the ALICE Forward Calorimeter, scheduled for installment before LHC Run 4. Prototypes of the calorimeter, which consists of an electromagnetic and a hadronic part, have undergone extensive beam tests, and simulation software is being updated based on the outcome of these measurements.
One suitable master project could be contributions to more realistic simulations of the FoCal physics performance regarding specific signals as light neutral mesons (\(\pi^0, \eta, \omega\)) in hadronic collisions, or heavy vector mesons like J/\(\psi\) and the excited charmonium state \(\psi\)(2S), in ultraperipheral collisions, aiming at optimisation of the relevant reconstruction techniques.
Detection of the highly energetic particles entering FoCal is based on electromagnetic and hadronic shower development in the two calorimeter segments. The simulations of these showers are computationally very expensive, but can be sped up using AI techniques. A second master topic could compare the performance of fast generative AI algorithms with the known baseline; slow step-by-step simulations taking all physics processes explicitly into account.