The first 500 crystals for the ALICE experiment's photon spectrometer (PHOS) arrived at CERN in May 2002 after a journey via Moscow from the town of Apatity in the Russian arctic region. They are the first of 17,000 lead tungstate crystals that will make up the PHOS.
On 25 September 2003, the two coils for the ALICE dipole magnet arrived at point 2 of the LHC after a 1200 km journey from their manufacturer, Sigmaphi, in Vannes, France. Each coil is 5 m long, 6 m wide, more than 3 m high and weighs 20 tonnes.
In mid-July 2006, ALICE reached some important milestones with the installation of the trigger and tracking chambers of the muon spectrometer. These are the first detectors to be installed in their final position in the underground cavern at point 2.
Different elements for particle identification in ALICE began to arrive in the cavern later in 2006, beginning with the High Momentum Particle Identification Detector (HMPID) installed inside the solenoid magnet on 23 September.
In January 2007 the fragile 5 m diameter time projection chamber (TPC) weighing 8 tonnes was lowered into the cavern. (Courtesy A Saba for CERN.)
On 15 March 2007, the inner tracking system (ITS) was inserted into the TPC. The ITS consists of six layers of high-precision silicon detectors, with double-sided silicon strips (above) in the outer two layers, silicon drift detectors in the middle two layers and silicon pixels in the two inner layers.
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At the end of April 2008, the time-of-flight (TOF) detector was completed and installed around the TPC, within the huge solenoid magnet and 3.7 m from the beam. Here a TOF supermodule is seen under assembly at CERN. (Courtesy A Saba for CERN.)
On 15 June the silicon pixel detector at the heart of ALICE saw the first signs of particles at the LHC during tests in a transfer line.