Development and Commissioning of the Pixel Trigger System for the ALICE Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

This thesis describes the work carried out at CERN, within the ALICE experiment, for the commissioning of the Silicon Pixel Detector and for the optimization of the detector operating efficiency, in order to allow operating the experiment with proton and ion beams in 2009 and 2010. This has been achieved with systematic studies of the operating conditions, efficiencies and readout thresholds, and with the development of procedures for dedicated performance tests. New procedures have been studied and implemented to calibrate the trigger signal generated by each of the Silicon Pixel Detector front-end chips, in order to provide a very reliable signal to the first level trigger decision. Procedures have also been implemented to optimize the overall detector efficiency as a function of the detector configuration.