Electron Identification with the ALICE TRD

Abstract

In this talk an overview of the ALICE TRD detector status is presented. The TRD provides identification of electrons with a momentum of p>1 GeV/c. Its main objective is the measurement of heavy quarkonia in heavy ion collisions. The final detector will consist of 540 individual drift chambers with 1.2 million read out channels. Fast on-detector reconstruction of the data enables the TRD to deliver its information already on the trigger level. Results concerning position and angle resolution and electron identification as well as measurements of transition radiation spectra from a recent test beam are shown and discussed. Three different methods of electron identification are explained and their performance is discussed.