Inner tracking system of the ALICE experiment. Overview

The ALICE experiment, one of the four LHC experiments, is dedicated to study Heavy Ion collisions at the center-of-mass energy of the 5.5 TeV per nucleon pair. The ALICE detector is designed as a general purpose detector capable of measuring most phenomena related to the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) state of matter. A set of high granularity detectors is used for tracking and includes an Inner Tracking System, a large-volume Time-Projection Chamber and a Transition–Radiation Detector. ner Tracking System is designed for high precision reconstruction of the primary and secondary vertices and tracking and identification of low momentum particles. Motivations and requirements for the ITS tracking system are presented and specifics of the design and performance are discussed.