ALICE TPC commissioning results

ALICE is a dedicated heavy-ion experiment at CERN LHC aiming to study the properties of the quark-gluon plasma. A lead–lead collision might produce several 10 00 new particles. Detailed study of the event requires precise measurements of the particle tracks. A 90 m 3 Time Projection Chamber (TPC) with more than 500 000 read-out pads was built as the main central barrel tracker. Collisions can be recorded at a rate of up to about 1 kHz. The front-end electronics, designed from FPGAs and custom ASICs, performs shaping, amplification, digitisation and digital filtering of the signals. The data are forwarded to DAQ via 216 1.25 Gb/s fibre-optical links. Configuration, control and monitoring is done by an embedded Linux system on the front-end electronics. production runs with beam, extensive commissioning using tracks from cosmics and from the laser system as well as clusters from radioactive krypton gas is needed. Extensive results have been obtained with respect to the performance of the TPC including its sub-systems.