Speaker
Dr
Panos Christakoglou
(NIKHEF - Utrecht University)
Description
The Inner Tracking System (ITS) of the ALICE experiment, consists of six
cylindrical layers of silicon detectors, the Silicon Pixel Detectors (SPD),
the Silicon Drift Detectors (SDD) and the Silicon Strip Detectors (SSD). It
covers the central pseudo-rapidity region ($|\eta| < 1.0$) for all vertices
located within the length of the interaction diamond ($\pm 1 \sigma$).
The outer layers of the ITS consist of double sided Silicon Strip Detectors
mounted on carbon-fiber support structures. The SSD is crucial for the
connection of tracks from the main tracking device of ALICE, the Time
Projection Chamber (TPC), to the ITS and also provides dE/dx information to
assist particle identification for low-momentum particles. The detector
consists of 1698 modules each one having 1536 p and n-side strips, resulting
in total to more than 2.6 million channels. The SSD has been actively
participating in all the testing, commissioning and run activities as well as
in all the data taking periods of the ALICE experiment, making it the largest
working double sided detector in the world. It has registered large statistics
of cosmic data in 2008 and is included in the initial detector configuration
of ALICE for the first LHC collisions.
In this talk, the latest results from the commissioning of the SSD with
cosmics will be presented. The hardware status of the detector, the front-end
electronics, cooling, data acquisition and issues related to the on-line
monitoring will be shown. In addition, the procedures implemented and followed
to address the alignment with the rest of the ITS sub-detectors along with
both on-line and off-line calibration strategies will be described. Finally,
results from simulations as well as from the reconstruction of cosmic data
demonstrating the performance of the detector will be presented, proving that
the SSD is ready for the forthcoming proton-proton data taking.
Primary author
Dr
Panos Christakoglou
(NIKHEF - Utrecht University)
