THE ALICE TPC

Abstract

ALICE [1] is one of the four experiments presently under construction for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. ALICE is a general-purpose heavy-ion experiment designed to study the physics of strongly interacting nuclear matter and the quark-gluon plasma in nucleus-nucleus collisions. At a maximum cms energy of 5.5 TeV per nucleon in Pb-Pb collisions, up to 8000 charged particles per unit rapidity are produced within a central collision. Owing to the enormous particle multiplicity per event, very specific requirements are made on the performance of the detectors, the electronics and the data acquisition. The ALICE TPC, operated in a solenoid of 0.5 T, is the main detector of the ALICE experiment for tracking, momentum measurement and particle identification of charged particles. In conjunction with the Transition Radiation Detector (TRD), the Inner Tracking System (ITS), Cherenkov counters (HMPID) and Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers for time of flight (TOF), the TPC will provide identification of leptonic and hadronic particles in the momentum range from 0.5 to 10 GeV/c.