The commissioning of the ALICE time-of-flight detector and results from the 2008 cosmic-ray data taking

The Time-Of-Flight (TOF) detector of the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC is based on Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPCs) capable to achieve a time resolution better than 50 ps. The TOF detector consists of about 153 000 readout channels covering a total area of about 150 m(2). In this paper the results of the commissioning of the full TOF are reported, including the first calibration results obtained with cosmic rays. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved,