Barrel Tracking Upgrade Project (BTU)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Laboratory for Nuclear Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland has opened a new high-energy frontier in the physics of ultra high-density hadronic matter and the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP).  At the LHC the A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) is the dedicated experiment for the study of the QGP.  The ALICE-USA Collaboration under the leadership of the ORNL High Energy Nuclear Physics Group is undertaking a project for the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics (NP) to fabricate major upgrades to the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) and Inner Tracking System (ITS) for the ALICE experiment.  Together the US scope of this upgrade to the ALICE experiment is known as the Barrel Tracking Upgrade (BTU) project.  The ALICE-USA BTU is a component of the larger overall ALICE upgrade project being undertaken in preparation for LHC Run-3, which is scheduled for start of operations in 2021.  The BTU project will enable the use of rare probes of the QGP such as Heavy-Quark Jets and photon-jet correlations to study the nature of strongly interacting, QGP matter with unprecedented precision.