The ALICE transition radiation detector

The ALICE Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) is equipped with 750 m **2 total area of gas chambers with radiators for particle tracking and electron identification above 1 GeV/c, divided in 540 modules organized in 18 sectors and 6 layers, in a barrel geometry between 2.9 and 3.7 m from the beam axis. The TRD will also serve as a trigger on high-p//te**+e**- pairs in order to reduce the collision rate to the readout event rate, by increasing the statistics on rare signals such J/psi and Upsilon. In this paper the ALICE TRD will be briefly introduced.