The Fast Interaction Trigger for the ALICE Upgrade

As a part of the preparations for the LHC Run 3 and 4, the ALICE experiment at CERN is undertaking a thorough upgrade of the setup. In particular, all ALICE subsystems have to cope with the increased interaction rate of 50 kHz in Pb-Pb and up to 1 MHz in pp collisions. Compared to Run 2, this is up to two orders of magnitude more collisions. Although the solution for the majority of ALICE detectors is to switch to a continuous readout, several of the older systems (TRD, CPV, HMPID, EMCAL, DCAL, and PHOS) would still need an external trigger or a wakeup signal. The Fast Interaction Trigger (FIT) will generate a minimum-bias and a multiplicity trigger with the maximum latency below 425 ns. It will also measure the collision time with a resolution of < 40 ps and serve as the main ALICE luminometer, providing direct, real-time feedback to the LHC for the beam tuning. In the offine analysis, FIT will aid in the reconstruction of the vertex position, assess forward particle multiplicity, centrality, and event plane, and will be used for the study of diffractive physics at forward rapidity. FIT consists of three subsystems: a fast Cherenkov detector array using MCP-PMTs as photosensors, a large scintillator ring employing a novel light collection system, and a scintillator-based Forward Diffractive Detector. In this thesis, the detector design is presented and verified. The description of detector components, along with the key test results of individual components, component assemblies, and of the full detector simulation are presented and discussed. They show that FIT has been optimized to fulfill all of the required functionalities and operate efficiently within the imposed constraints.