Speaker
Description
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is one of the four main experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The ALICE collaboration plans a major detector upgrade during long shutdown 2, which started at the end of 2018, followed by Run 3 starting in 2021. In Run 3 ALICE will be able to collect 10 nb$^{-1}$ of Pb-Pb collisions at luminosities up to $\mathcal{L}=\, 6 \times 10^{27}$ cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ corresponding to collision rates of $50$ kHz, using a different readout strategy. The ALICE upgrade will also make possible the collection of 6 pb$^{-1}$ of pp collisions at the equivalent Pb-Pb nucleon energy as well as 50 pb$^{-1}$ of p-Pb collisions, both at collision rates of up to $200$ kHz. With these physics goals, the statistics of data in ALICE will be increased by a factor of $100$ over the numbers achieved with the present ALICE detector up to LS2. The ALICE upgrade will require a very different triggering strategy with respect to the current and hence a new Central Trigger System (CTS) is needed.
The ALICE-CTS will be completely redesigned and the strategy for selecting events will be different from that employed in previous runs. The CTS will have a Central Trigger Processor (CTP) and Local Trigger Units (LTUs) as detector interface. However, the heart of the CTS will be a trigger board referred to as ALICE Trigger Board (ATB), based on a Kintex UltraScale FPGA, and the use of a novel Timing Trigger Control system based on Passive Optical Networks (TTC-PON). An overview and an account of the current status of the ALICE-CTS will be presented.
