Laboratoire de Physique de Clermont

The Muon Forward Tracker (MFT) detector has been successfully installed on schedule during week # 49 in the ALICE cavern. This is an important milestone toward the completion of the project. The insertion operation was extremely delicate since the MFT is placed a few millimeters from the beam pipe and very close to the interaction point. The MFT team is now looking forward finalizing the cabling of the detector and starting commissioning operations onsite.

The LPC has been strongly involved in the MFT since the beginning of the project in 2010 with contributions to various documents such as the Letter of Intend, Technical Proposal, Technical Design Report and Engineering Design Report. An important R&D work has been achieved on silicon sensor gluing techniques and several software developments (geometry, tracking, matching) have been carried out with the help of many postdocs.

People involved are Franck Manso (project leader at LPC), Sarah Porteboeuf-Houssais (currently at CERN for 2 years as MFT data coordinator), Bogdan Vulpescu (in charge of software development), and Cédric Crozatier and Pierre Verdier (who actively took part in the detector assembly at CERN in the last two years).