The Time Of Flight (TOF) system of the ALICE experiment

Abstract

The double-stack Multigap Resistive Plate Chamber (MRPC) is the detector chosen for the large Time-Of-Flight system of the ALICE experiment at CERN LHC. The TOF barrel has to cover an area of 160 m2 and has to be highly segmented (160.000 readout pads of 2.5×3.5 cm2) in order to keep the occupancy at the 15% level. In this article recent results on several prototype MRPCs are presented, with particular emphasis on the study of the uniformity of these devices.