ALICE results on heavy-ion physics at the LHC

ALICE is a multipurpose detector for high-energy nucleus-nucleus physics at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. In November 2010, ALICE took its first Pb-Pb data at the center-of-mass energy of 2.76TeV per nucleon pair; reference data in proton-proton collisions at the same energy were collected in 2011. This paper gives an overview of the main physics results obtained with these data. In particular, I will present results on identified charged and strange particle transverse momentum spectra, on anisotropic flow of charged particles, on open heavy flavour and quarkonia production in Pb-Pb collisions, compared to pp collisions. These first Pb-Pb results from ALICE at LHC are broadly consistent with expectations based on lower energy RHIC and SPS data. They indicate that matter created in these collisions, while initially much larger and hotter, still behaves like a very strongly interacting, almost perfect liquid. A brief outlook on the expected results from the second, higher statistics Pb-Pb run of Fall 2011 will be given as well.