ALICE Barrel Tracking Upgrade

The ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a dedicated facility for the study of the Quark-Gluon Plasma using Pb-Pb Heavy Ion Collisions at center of mass energies of up to 5 TeV per nucleon. Throughout the first run of the LHC, which concluded in 2012, the ALICE experiment revealed properties of the Quark Gluon Plasma, which were in many ways a natural extension of those seen at RHIC to the higher densities and temperatures at the LHC. Many observables, however, particularly those at very high PT or heavy quark masses appear to behave tantalizingly different at the LHC. To explore this high PT, heavy quark sector further, we are undertaking an upgrade of the ALICE detector targeted at the high luminosity beams that will become available in LHC Run-3, commencing in 2020. This upgrade will increase the maximum readout rate of the ALICE Detector x10 for un-triggered, minimum bias, events and x100 for triggered (e.g. high PT) events to accommodate the heavy ion interaction rates expected in LHC Run-3 and will simultaneously provide greatly improved vertexing capability. Together, these improvements to ALICE enable measurements of new observables in LHC heavy ion and pp collisions that open up qualitatively new opportunities for the study of the Quark-Gluon Plasma and other fundamental QCD phenomena. This upgrade is carried out by the ALICE-USA Collaboration including Nuclear Physics Groups at the University of California, Berkeley; University of Houston; Lawrence Berkeley National Lab; Oak Ridge National Lab; University of Texas, Austin; and Yale University. The project is under the leadership of the University of Tennessee Knoxville group.