Upgrade of the ALICE ITS

Abstract

During the Long Shutdown 2 of the LHC in 2018/2019, the ALICE experiment plans the installation of a novel Inner Tracking System. It will replace the current six layer detector system with a seven layer detector using Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors. The upgraded Inner Tracking System will have significantly improved tracking and vertexing capabilities, as well as readout rate to cope with the expected increased Pb-Pb luminosity of the LHC. The choice of Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors has been driven by the specific requirements of ALICE as a heavy ion experiment dealing with rare processes at low transverse momenta. This leads to stringent requirements on the material budget of 0.3 % X/X0 per layer for the three innermost layers. Furthermore, the detector will see large hit densities of 19 cm 2 =event on average for minimum-bias events in the inner most layer and has to stand a moderate maximum total ionising dose of 700 krad and a nonionising energy loss of 1 10 13 1 MeV neq=cm 2 . The Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor detectors are manufactured using the TowerJazz 0:18 m CMOS Imaging Sensor process on wafers with a high-resistivity epitaxial layer. This contribution summarises the recent R&D activities and focuses on results on the large-scale pixel sensor prototypes.