The CMS alignment challenge

The CMS tracking detectors are of unprecedented complexity: 66 million pixel cells distributed over 1440 modules in the Pixel Tracker; 9.6 million readout channels in 15 148 silicon strip modules in the Strip Tracker; 250 drift, 468 cathode strip, and 360+252 resistive plate chambers in the Muon System. All of them need to be aligned to a precision better than their intrinsic resolution in order not to degrade tracking performance. Besides being a numerical and time-intensive challenge, it is a difficult task to constrain all the possible degrees of freedom, to properly handle the large amount of data, and to face the modeling imperfections and subtle systematics the data will show once the detector is turned on. We briefly introduce the topic to set up the scene for the following articles about CMS alignment, in which more results will be presented.