Performance Study for a Muon Forward Tracker in the ALICE Experiment

ALICE is the experiment dedicated to the study of the quark gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions at the CERN <span class="roman">LHC</span>. Improvements of ALICE subdetectors are envisaged for the upgrade plans of year 2017. The Muon Forward Tracker (<span class="roman">MFT</span>) is a proposal in view of this upgrade, motivated both by the possibility to increase the physics potential of the muon spectrometer and to allow new measurements of general interest for the whole ALICE physics. In order to evaluate the feasibility of this upgrade, a detailed simulation of the MFT setup is being performed within the AliRoot framework, with emphasis on the tracking capabilities as a function of the number, position and size of the pixel planes, and the corresponding physics performances. In this report, we present preliminary results on the MFT performances in a low-multiplicity environment.