ALICE Inner Tracking System Upgrade: construction and commissioning

Understand

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is the CERN LHC experiment optimized for the study of the strongly interacting matter produced in heavy-ion collisions and devoted to the characterization of the Quark-Gluon Plasma.

• To achieve the physics program for LHC Run 3 and 4, ALICE is undergoing a major upgrade of the experimental apparatus during the ongoing second long LHC shutdown.
• A key element of the ALICE upgrade is the substitution of the Inner Tracking System (ITS) with a completely new silicon-based detector whose features will allow the reconstruction of rare physics channels which could not be accessed before with the ITS layout used during LHC Run 1 and 2.
• The enabling technology for such performance boost is the adoption of custom-designed MAPS (Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors) as detecting element.