Application of vertex and mass constraints in track-based alignment Amoraal, J.; Blouw, J.; Blusk, S. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
06/2013, Volume:
712
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The software alignment of planar tracking detectors using samples of charged particle trajectories may lead to global detector distortions that affect vertex and momentum resolution. We present an ...alignment procedure that constrains such distortions by making use of samples of decay vertices reconstructed from two or more trajectories and putting constraints on their invariant mass. We illustrate the method by using a sample of invariant-mass constrained vertices from D0→K−π+ decays to remove a curvature bias in the LHCb spectrometer.
Radiation hardness of the LHCb Outer Tracker van Eijk, D.; Bachmann, S.; Bauer, Th ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
09/2012, Volume:
685
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper presents results on the radiation hardness of the LHCb Outer Tracker (OT) during LHC operation in 2010 and 2011. Modules of the OT have shown to suffer from ageing effects that lead to ...gain loss, after irradiation in the laboratory. Under irradiation at moderate intensities an insulating layer is formed on the anode wire of the OT straw cells. This ageing effect is caused by contamination of the counting gas due to outgassing of the glue used in the construction of the OT modules. Two methods to monitor gain stability in the OT are presented: module scans with radioactive sources and the study of hit efficiency as a function of amplifier threshold. No gain loss is observed after receiving 1.3fb−1 of integrated luminosity corresponding to an integrated charge of 0.055C/cm in the hottest spot of the detector.
The LHCb Outer Tracker straw tubes have shown to suffer from gain loss after irradiation in the laboratory at moderate intensities. Under irradiation an insulating layer is formed on the anode wire. ...The ageing is caused by contamination of the counting gas due to outgassing of the plastifier di-isopropyl-naphthalene in araldite AY103-1 used at construction. This paper presents irradiation results with and without the plastifier, together with the mass spectra of the glue samples. In addition, the effects of wire heating and large currents are presented.
The LHCb Outer Tracker (OT) detector has shown to suffer from gain loss after irradiation in the laboratory at moderate intensities. Under irradiation an insulating layer is formed on the anode wire. ...The ageing is caused by contamination of the counting gas due to outgassing of the glue used in construction namely araldite AY103-1. The gain loss is concentrated upstream the gas flow, and at moderate irradiation intensity only. The ageing rate is reduced by longterm flushing and by the addition of a few percent of
O
2
to the gas mixture. Furthermore, applying a large positive high voltage (beyond the amplification regime) removes the insulating deposits without damaging the wire surface. This paper presents both the characteristics of the ageing phenomenon and the beneficial treatments.
The front end electronics of the LHCb straw tube tracker Berkien, A.; Deppe, H.; Dupree, T. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
05/2010, Volume:
617, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The LHCb experiment is a single-arm spectrometer, designed to study
B-hadron decays at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is crucial to accurately and efficiently track the charged decay products ...with the Outer Tracker straw tube detector, in the high-density particle environment of the LHC. The Outer Tracker Front End electronics provide the precise (0.5
ns) drift-time measurement, at an average occupancy of 5% and at a 1
MHz trigger rate. The tracking procedure requires high-efficiency, while at the same time putting stringent limits on the noise level. The mass production and installation of 450 fully operational Front End boxes is completed. Quality checks have been performed at several stages, at the level of individual boards and at the global level with dedicated test systems mimicking the real detector and capable of simulating all the readout functionalities. An excellent overall threshold uniformity is achieved with low noise levels.
The Outer Tracker detector of the HERA-B experiment—Part I: Detector Albrecht, H.; Bauer, Th.S.; Beck, M. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
12/2005, Volume:
555, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The HERA-B Outer Tracker is a large system of planar drift chambers with about 113
000 read-out channels. Its inner part has been designed to be exposed to a particle flux of up to
2
×
10
5
cm
-
2
s
...-
1
, thus coping with conditions similar to those expected for future hadron collider experiments. Thirteen superlayers, each consisting of two individual chambers, have been assembled and installed in the experiment. The stereo layers inside each chamber are composed of honeycomb drift tube modules with 5 and
10
mm
diameter cells. Chamber aging is prevented by coating the cathode foils with thin layers of copper and gold, together with a proper drift gas choice. Longitudinal wire segmentation is used to limit the occupancy in the most irradiated detector regions to about 20%. The production of 978 modules was distributed among six different laboratories and took 15 months. For all materials in the fiducial region of the detector good compromises of stability versus thickness were found. A closed-loop gas system supplies the Ar/CF
4/CO
2 gas mixture to all chambers. The successful operation of the HERA-B Outer Tracker shows that a large tracker can be efficiently built and safely operated under huge radiation load at a hadron collider.
The HERA-B Outer Tracker is a large detector with 112,674 drift chamber channels. It is exposed to a particle flux of up to
2
×
10
5
cm
-
2
s
-
1
thus coping with conditions similar to those expected ...for the LHC experiments. The front-end readout system, based on the ASD-8 chip and a customized TDC chip, is designed to fulfil the requirements on low noise, high sensitivity, rate tolerance, and high integration density.
The TDC system is based on an ASIC which digitizes the time in bins of about 0.5
ns within a total of 256 bins. The chip also comprises a pipeline to store data from 128 events which is required for a deadtime-free trigger and data acquisition system.
We report on the development, installation, and commissioning of the front-end electronics, including the grounding and noise suppression schemes, and discuss its performance in the HERA-B experiment.