The ALICE experiment at the LHC is dedicated to the study of the hot and dense medium produced in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. Direct photons provide an excellent tool for testing QCD predictions, and serve as a valuable source of information about thermodynamic properties of the hot matter created in nucleus–nucleus collisions. Electromagnetic decays of neutral mesons produce dominant background for the direct photon and dielectron studies and should be measured with high accuracy. Furthermore, spectra of light neutral mesons provide excellent possibility to probe with high precision the parton structure of colliding nucleons and parton energy loss in hot medium. We report recent results from ALICE on the direct photon and neutral meson measurements in pp, p –Pb and Pb–Pb collisions at several energies together with the model calculations.
D. A. Averyanov (Mon,) studied this question.