Speaker
Description
ALICE is the LHC experiment dedicated to the study of heavy-ion collisions. At forward rapidity a muon spectrometer detects muons from low mass mesons, quarkonia, open heavy-flavor hadrons as well as weak bosons. A muon selection based on transverse momentum is made by a trigger system composed of 72 resistive plate chambers (RPC) for a total of ∼140 m2 of active surface and almost 21000 channels. For the LHC Run 1 and the ongoing Run 2 the RPCs have been equipped with a non-amplified FEE called ADULT. However, in view of an increase in luminosity expected for Run 3 (2021--2023) the possibility to use an amplified FEE has been explored, in order to improve the counting rate limitation and to prevent the aging of the detector by reducing the charge per hit. Considering the peculiar specificities of the project, a prototype of this new electronics (FEERIC) has been developed and tested first with cosmic rays before equipping one RPC in the ALICE cavern with it. In this talk the most important performance indicators (such as efficiency, dark current, dark rate, cluster size, integrated charge and charge per hit) of the RPC equipped with this new FEE will be presented and compared to those obtained with ADULT, in pp collisions at s√=13 TeV and in Pb--Pb collisions at sNN‾‾‾‾√=5 TeV.
