Status and performance of the ALICE MRPC-based Time-Of-Flight detector

ALICE is the dedicated heavy-ion experiment at the CERN LHC. One of the main detectors devoted to charged hadron identification in the ALICE central barrel is a large Time-Of-Flight (TOF) array; it allows separation among pions, kaons and protons up to a few GeV/c, covering the full azimuthal angle and −0.9 < η < 0.9. The very good performance required for such a system has been achieved by means of the Multigap Resistive Plate Chamber (MRPC) whose intrinsic time resolution is better than 50 ps with an overall efficiency close to 100% and a large operational plateau; the full array consists of 1593 MRPCs covering a cylindrical surface of 141 m². In this report, the status of the TOF detector and the performance achieved during the 2010 and 2011 data taking periods are reported together with selected physics results obtained with pp and Pb-Pb collisions.