Performance of the ALICE VZERO system

E. Abbas , N. Arbor (1) , G. Conesa Balbastre (1) , J. Faivre (1) , C. Furget (1) , R. Guernane (1) , S. Kox (1) , J.S. Real (1) , C. Silvestre (1) , R. Vernet (2) , I. Belikov (3) , B. Hippolyte (3) , C. Kuhn (3) , L. Molnar (3) , C. Roy (3) , X. Sanchez Castro (3) , S. Senyukov (3) , Laurent Aphecetche (4) , Guillaume Batigne (4) , E. Bergognon (4) , M. Bregant (4) , H. Delagrange (4) , B. Erazmus (4) , Magali Estienne (4) , Marie Germain (4) , A. Lardeux (4) , Gines Martinez Garcia (4) , A. Mas (4) , L. Massacrier (4) , Philippe Pillot (4) , Y. Schutz (4) , Alexandre Shabetai (4) , Diego Stocco (4) , Y.W. Baek (5) , V. Barret (5) , N. Bastid (5) , P. Crochet (5) , P. Dupieux (5) , R. Ichou (5) , S. Li (5) , X. Lopez (5) , F. Manso (5) , M. Marchisone (5) , S. Porteboeuf-Houssais (5) , P. Rosnet (5) , B. Vulpescu (5) , X. Zhang (5) , B. Espagnon (6) , C. Hadjidakis (6) , I. Hrivnacov (6) , I. Lakomov (6) , L. Valencia Palomo (5) , C. Cheshkov (7) , B. Cheynis (7) , L. Ducroux (7) , J.-Y. Grossiord (7) , Maxime Guilbaud (7) , R. Tieulent (7) , A. Uras (7) , Y. Zoccarato (7)

1 LPSC - Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie
2 CC-IN2P3 - Centre de Calcul de l'IN2P3
3 DRS-IPHC - Département Recherches Subatomiques
4 SUBATECH - Laboratoire SUBATECH Nantes
5 LPC - Laboratoire de Physique Corpusculaire - Clermont-Ferrand
6 IPNO - Institut de Physique Nucléaire d'Orsay
7 IPNL - Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon

ALICE is an LHC experiment devoted to the study of strongly interacting matter in proton--proton, proton--nucleus and nucleus--nucleus collisions at ultra-relativistic energies. The ALICE VZERO system, made of two scintillator arrays at asymmetric positions, one on each side of the interaction point, plays a central role in ALICE. In addition to its core function as a trigger, the VZERO system is used to monitor LHC beam conditions, to reject beam-induced backgrounds and to measure basic physics quantities such as luminosity, particle multiplicity, centrality and event plane direction in nucleus-nucleus collisions. After describing the VZERO system, this publication presents its performance over more than four years of operation at the LHC.

Domaines: Physique Nucléaire Expérimentale [nucl-ex]

E. Abbas, N. Arbor, G. Conesa Balbastre, J. Faivre, C. Furget, et al.. Performance of the ALICE VZERO system. Journal of Instrumentation, 2013, 8, pp.P10016. ⟨10.1088/1748-0221/8/10/P10016⟩. ⟨in2p3-00834081⟩