The ALICE 3 particle identification systems

The ALICE Collaboration has proposed a completely new apparatus, ALICE 3, for the LHC Runs 5 and 6. The experiment will enable novel studies of the quark-gluon plasma focusing on low-pT heavy-flavour production, as well as on precise multi-differential measurements of dielectron emission to probe the mechanism of chiral-symmetry restoration and the time-evolution of the QGP temperature. The detector consists of a large pixel-based tracking system covering eight units of pseudorapidity and including a vertex detector mounted on a retractable structure inside the beam pipe. Moreover, it will be endowed with a comprehensive particle identification (PID) system, implementing silicon time-of-flight (TOF) detector, an aerogel-based ring-imaging Cherenkov (RICH) detector, a muon identification system, and an electromagnetic calorimeter. This paper presents the conceptual design of the PID subsystems and technology options, as well as the expected performance from simulation studies and first results achieved in the ongoing R&D activities.