Commissioning and first performances of the ALICE MID RPCs

TL;DR

This paper reports on the commissioning, upgrades, and initial performance results of the ALICE Muon IDentifier's RPCs during LHC Run 3, highlighting improvements for higher luminosity and reduced aging.

Contribution

It introduces the new front-end electronics FEERIC and details the first performance results of the upgraded RPCs in the ALICE Muon IDentifier.

Findings

Successful commissioning of the upgraded RPCs

Enhanced rate capability and reduced aging observed

Improved detector performance in Run 3 conditions

Abstract

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to study p-p and Pb-Pb collisions at ultra-relativistic energies. ALICE is equipped with a Muon Spectrometer (MS) to study the heavy charmonia in p-p and heavy ion collisions via their muonic decay. At first, in the LHC Run 1 and 2 the selection of interesting events for muon physics in the MS was performed with a dedicated Muon Trigger system based on Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) operated in maxi-avalanche mode. During the Long Shutdown 2 (LS2) of LHC ALICE underwent a major upgrade of its apparatus: since Run 3 (started in July 2022), in order to fully profit from the increased luminosity of Pb-Pb collisions (from 20 kHz in Run 2 to 50 kHz in Run 3), the ALICE experiment is running in continuous readout (triggerless) mode and the Muon Trigger became the Muon IDentifier (MID). In order to reduce the RPC ageing and to increase the rate capability, it was decided to use a new front-end electronics FEERIC with a pre-amplification stage to minimize the charge released per hit inside the gas gap. A description of the MID upgrades, together with the results and performances of the RPCs from the commissioning, is presented in this talk.