The ALICE silicon strip detector system

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) optimized for the study of heavy-ion collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 5.5 TeV per nucleon. The detector consists essentially of two main components: the central part, composed of detectors mainly devoted to the study of hadronic signals and dielectrons, and the forward muon spectrometer devoted to the study of quarkonia behaviour in dense matter. The central part, which covers +-45 deg. (|eta|<0.9) over the full azimuth, is embedded in a large magnet with a weak solenoidal field. Outside of the Inner Tracking System (ITS), there are a cylindrical TPC and a large area PID array of time-of-flight (TOF) counters. In addition, there are two small-area single-arm detectors: an electromagnetic calorimeter (Photon Spectrometer, PHOS) and an array of RICH counters optimized for high-momentum inclusive particle identification (HMPID). This article describes the silicon strip detector system used in the outer layers of the ALICE inner tracking system.