In this paper it is shown that a measurement of the relative luminosity changes at the LHC may be obtained by analysing the currents drawn from the high voltage power supplies of the electromagnetic section of the forward calorimeter of the ATLAS detector. The method was verified with a reproduction of a small section of the ATLAS forward calorimeter using proton beams of known beam energies and variable intensities at the U-70 accelerator at IHEP in Protvino, Russia. The experimental setup and the data taking during a test beam run in April 2008 are described in detail. A comparison of the measured high voltage currents with reference measurements from beam intensity monitors shows a linear dependence on the beam intensity. The non-linearities are measured to be less than 0.5 % combining statistical and systematic uncertainties.
The ATLAS hadronic Tile Calorimeter will undergo major upgrades to the on- and off-detector electronics in preparation for the High Luminosity program of the Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) in 2026, so that the system can cope with the HL-LHC increased radiation levels and out-of-time pileup. The on-detector electronics of the upgraded system will continuously digitize and transmit all photo-multiplier signals to the off-detector systems at a 40 MHz rate. The off-detector electronics will store the data in pipeline buffers, produce digital hadronic tower sums for the ATLAS Level-0 trigger system, and read out selected events. The modular on-detector electronics feature radiation-tolerant commercial off-the-shelf components and redundant design to minimize single points of failure. The timing, control and communication interface with the off-detector electronics is implemented with modern Field Programmable Gate Arrays and high speed fibre optic links running up to 9.6 Gbps.
Absolute normalisation of the LHC measurements with a precision of O(1%) is desirable but beyond the reach of the present LHC detectors. This series of papers proposes and evaluates a measurement method capable to achieve such a precision target. In our earlier paper we have selected the phase-space region where the lepton pair production cross section in pp collisions at the LHC can be controlled with < 1 % precision and is large enough to reach a comparable statistical accuracy of the absolute luminosity measurement on the day-by-day basis. In the present one the performance requirements for a dedicated detector, indispensable to efficiently select events in the proposed phase-space region, are discussed.
Radiation-tolerant, high speed, high density and low power commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are planned to be used in the upgrade to the Liquid Argon (LAr) calorimeter front end (FE) trigger readout electronics. Total ionization dose (TID) and single event effect (SEE) are two important radiation effects which need to be characterized on COTS ADCs. In our initial TID test, Texas Instruments (TI) ADS5272 was identified to be the top performer after screening a total 17 COTS ADCs from different manufacturers with dynamic range and sampling rate meeting the requirements of the FE electronics. Another interesting feature of ADS5272 is its 6.5 clock cycles latency, which is the shortest among the 17 candidates. Based on the TID performance, we have designed a SEE evaluation system for ADS5272, which allows us to further assess its radiation tolerance. In this paper, we present a detailed design of ADS5272 SEE evaluation system and show the effectiveness of this system while evaluating ADS5272 SEE characteristics in multiple irradiation tests. According to TID and SEE test results, ADS5272 was chosen to be implemented in the full-size LAr Trigger Digitizer Board (LTDB) demonstrator, which will be installed on ATLAS calorimeter during the 2014 Long Shutdown 1 (LS1).
The high-luminosity phase of the Large Hadron Collider will provide 5-7 times greater luminosities than assumed in the original detector design. An improved trigger system requires an upgrade of the readout electronics of the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter. Concepts for the future readout of the 182,500 calorimeter cells at 40-80 MHz and 16-bit dynamic range and the developments of radiation-tolerant, low-noise, low-power, and high-bandwidth front-end electronic components, including preamplifiers and shapers, 14-bit ADCs, and 10-Gb/s laser diode array drivers, are presented in this paper.
This article documents the characteristics of the high voltage (HV) system of the hadronic calorimeter TileCal of the ATLAS experiment. Such a system is suitable to supply reliable power distribution into particles physics detectors using a large number of PhotoMultiplier Tubes (PMTs). Measurements performed during the 2015 and 2016 data taking periods of the ATLAS detector show that its performance, in terms of stability and noise, fits the specifications. In particular, almost all the PMTs show a voltage instability smaller than 0.5 V corresponding to a gain stability better than 0.5%. A small amount of channels was found not working correctly. To diagnose the origin of such defects, the results of the HV measurements were compared to those obtained using a Laser system. The analysis shows that less than 0.2% of the about 10 thousand HV channels were malfunctioning.