ALICE TRD - Introduction



The Transition Radiation Detector (picture at right) is a component of the ALICE experiment, which studies the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) produced in nucleus-nucleus collisions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC started colliding proton beams in 2009; the first collisions of lead nuclei took place in Nov. 2010.
Read more about the LHC experiments

The TRD of ALICE is composed of 540 detectors, arranged in 18 sectors in azimuth, each of 5 stacks in longitudinal direction, with 6 layers per stack. The diameter of the TRD cylinder is about 7 m and the length also 7 m. It has more than 1 million channels of readout, each sampling the signal in 20 time bins. The active gas is a xenon-CO2 mixture.
TRD performs electron identification and triggering on electrons and jets, providing a trigger decision in 7 microseconds.
Read more about how it works.




Some links to pages on QGP and other stories:


Other links:


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A. Andronic
Last modified: Fri May 29 11:13:27 CEST 2015