ALICE Highlights

The ALICE experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider is dedicated to the study of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions, with the primary goal of investigating the properties and microscopic dynamics of the quark–gluon plasma (QGP). The ALICE apparatus is designed to measure a wide variety of particles and observables with data from various collision systems, including AA (Pb–Pb, Ne–Ne, OO), pA (p–Pb, pO), and pp. This contribution reviews the most recent ALICE highlights across collision systems, with particular emphasis on results enabled by the unprecedented Run 3 data samples, including the observation of partonic flow in high-multiplicity pp and p–Pb collisions, new results on collective flow and partonic energy loss in OO collisions, and precision measurements of strangeness enhancement from small to large systems. Further highlights will include elliptic flow of light nuclei and hypernuclei, and charm-baryon flow as a probe of heavy-quark interaction with the medium. The review concludes with the ambitious short- and long-term ALICE upgrade programme, from the Long Shutdown 3 upgrades to the ALICE 3 concept for Run 5 and beyond.