ALICE is one of the four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. ALICE is optimized to study collisions of nuclei at the ultra-relativistic energies provided by the LHC. These collisions offer the best experimental conditions to produce the quark–gluon plasma. Such conditions are believed to have existed up to a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang before quarks and gluons were bound together to form protons and neutrons. Recreating this primordial state of matter in the laboratory and understanding how it evolves will allow us to shed light on questions about how matter is organized and the mechanisms that confine quarks and gluons.