2–7 Sept 2018
Europe/Rome timezone

The upgrade of the ALICE Inner Tracking System at the CERN LHC

4 Sept 2018, 15:54
17m

Speaker

Ivan Ravasenga (TO)

Description

ALICE is one of the experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) studying the nuclear matter at extreme conditions of temperature and pressure. The third run of LHC will start in 2021 after a shutdown of two years to allow the upgrade of both the accelerator and the experiments. In Run 3 Pb-Pb collisions will be performed at a centre of mass energy per nucleon of 5.5 TeV, with a luminosity of 6 $\times$ 10$^{27}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$. The interaction rate will increase up to 50 kHz and 400 kHz for Pb-Pb and pp collisions, respectively. To fulfil the requirements of the ALICE physics program for Run 3, a major upgrade of the experimental apparatus is planned for installation in 2019-2020. One of the key elements of the ALICE upgrade is the construction of a new, ultra-light, high-resolution Inner Tracking System (ITS) to significantly enhance the determination of the distance of closest approach to the primary vertex, the tracking efficiency at low transverse momenta, and the read-out rate capabilities, with respect to what can be achieved with the current detector. The setup will consist of seven layers, longitudinally segmented in Staves, equipped with silicon Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors with a pixel size of the order of 30x30 $\mu m^{2}$ covering, for the first time, the large area of 10 m$^{2}$. The main physics goal is to improve the reconstruction capabilities of heavy flavour (c and b quarks) mesons and baryons. This contribution is dedicated to the description of the ITS upgrade project analysing the challenging aspects of the future detector showing how they have been implemented in the first Staves produced by the Collaboration. Finally, the expected physics performance with the new ITS will be outlined.

Selected session

Accelerators and Instrumentation

Primary author

Presentation materials