ALICE Electromagnetic Calorimeter Technical Design Report

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) at the LHC contains a wide array of detector systems for measuring hadrons, leptons, and photons. ALICE is designed to carry out comprehensive measurements of high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions, in order to study QCD matter under extreme conditions and to study the phase transition between confined matter and the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Discussion of the full ALICE physics program can be found in [1, 2]. The interaction and energy loss of high energy partons in matter provides a sensitive tomographic probe of the medium generated in high energy nuclear collisions (“jet quenching”) [3–6]. Jet quenching measurements have played a key role at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) [7–10] and will be central to the study of nuclear collisions at the LHC. This Technical Design Report describes a large acceptance Electromagnetic Calorimeter (EMCal) that will be installed in the ALICE central detector. The EMCal enhances ALICE's capabilities for jet quenching measurements. The addition of the EMCal enables triggering on high energy jets, reduces significantly the measurement bias for jet quenching studies, improves jet energy resolution, and augments existing ALICE capabilities to measure high momentum photons and electrons. Combined with ALICE's excellent capabilities to track and identify particles from very low pt to high pt the EMCal enables an extensive study of jet quenching at the LHC.