ALICE Muon Forward Tracker extracted for maintenance

ALICE Muon Forward Tracker (MFT), which was installed in the detector in 2020, has been fully extracted for maintenance and is currently being reconnected in a clean room.

Located just ~45 cm from the interaction point at the heart of the ALICE experiment, the MFT had been inaccessible for six years due to the LHC Run 3 data-taking activities and its position deep inside the detector. French teams from IP2I (Lyon), LPCA (Clermont-Ferrand), Subatech (Nantes) and the CEA (Saclay) participated in the extraction of the tracker with the ALICE CERN team and confirm, through an initial visual inspection, that it was in excellent condition after four years of operation (Run3: 2022-2026). The MFT was then transported to the surface and placed in a clean room, where it is currently being reconnected to a data acquisition system to allow for a complete qualification.

During LHC’s Run3 data collection campaign, the MFT enabled the collection of large amounts of data, which are currently being analysed to better understand the nature of matter at the scale of the strong interaction. Its reinstallation in view of the next, HiLumi run is scheduled for fall 2027.