The story of ALICE: Building the dedicated heavy ion detector at LHC
  This article documents the main design choices and the close to 20 years of preparation, detector R&D, construction and installation of ALICE, the dedicated heavy ion experiment at the CERN LHC accelerator. 
C. Fabjan (CERN and IHEP Vienna), J. Schukraft (CERN)
physics.ins-det hep-ex nucl-ex