Projects / Programmes
ATLAS Diamond Beam Monitor
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 1.02.06 |
Natural sciences and mathematics |
Physics |
Experimental physics of elementary particles |
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| P210 |
Natural sciences and mathematics |
Elementary particle physics, quantum field theory |
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| 1.03 |
Natural Sciences |
Physical sciences |
Experimental particle physics, Large Hadron Collider, ATLAS detector upgrade, tracking detectors, pCVD diamond detectors, pixel detectors, radiation damage, on-line luminosity monitoring, beam spot monitoring
Researchers (13)
Organisations (2)
Abstract
The spearhead of research in particle physics in the coming decade will be directed towards two frontiers: the energy frontier at the Large Hadron Collider and the precision frontier at the B-factories. The ultimate goal of these complementary approaches is to establish signals of physics beyond the Standard model. The road to the required sensitivity is via the increased luminosity, e.g. a tenfold increase of proton-proton collision rate in the upgraded LHC (sLHC) is planned.
The increased luminosity poses requirements that cannot be coped with by a substantial part of the current detector systems. The main burden of the sLHC is the tenfold increase in particle rates. This results in increased detector occupancy and subsequent radiation damage, especially in the innermost tracking detectors that will have to be replaced. The proposed project is aimed to provide support to the upgrade of the innermost tracking layers of ATLAS as well as to generic research on position sensitive particle sensors based on chemical vapour deposition (CVD) diamond.
The central goal of the project is the construction and installation of 24 diamond pixel detector modules into ATLAS by summer 2013. This is carried out as part of the ATLAS Insertable B-Layer project, which aims at the installation of an additional pixel detector layer in the LHC upgrade shutdown in 2013. The diamond pixel modules will be installed in the forward region (at eta~3) as 8 telescope assemblies (4/side) of 3 modules pointing to the interaction point. The purpose of this Diamond Beam Monitor is on-line monitoring of bunch-by-bunch luminosity and beam spot position. Each of the modules is based on a polycrystalline CVD diamond sensor with an active surface of 17.8 mm x 20 mm, divided into 26880 pixels of 50 um x 200 um. The sensor cells are individually bump bonded to the FE-I4 readout ASIC. The optical readout feeds the data into two parallel DAQ streams. One is triggered quasi-randomly and is sampling the 3564 individual bunches of the LHC orbit, the other is responding to the ATLAS L1 trigger. The aim of the first (private) data stream is to extract beam parameters as luminosity and beam spot position in an unbiased way, while the second is adding DBM data to ATLAS physics events.
The construction and operation of the DBM represents an important step towards the ultimate goal: the construction of one or two diamond sensor based tracking layers for the inner detector exchange for the Phase-II of the LHC upgrade around 2020. The aim is to limit the material in these innermost tracking layers below 1 % of radiation length. Diamond is a promising material in this strive because of its low Z, good radiation hardness, negligible leakage current and superb thermal conductivity. The sensor can operate at an almost arbitrary temperature and by itself does not require cooling, which can significantly simplify construction of the tracking layer(s).
The research will be carried out in the scope of the ATLAS IBL project and the ATLAS R&D upgrade project on diamond vertex detector.as well as in the framework of CERN RD-42 collaboration.
Significance for science
Research by the ATLAS experiment, supported in its upgrade plans by the proposed project, represents a challenging task at the very frontier of contemporary scientific endeavour, utilizing vast human and financial resources and stretching or even extending existing technologies to render the experiments possible. The experiment has been heavily scrutinized and finally approved by research committees, composed of leading experts from the field and beyond. They represent a joint effort of the global scientific community, and are constantly monitored by scientists as well as by the authorities that are funding them. Their task is to deepen our insight into constituents of matter and the forces acting between them. In this quest accelerators of highest energies and luminosities are used, to probe high energy densities as they existed a glimpse after the Big Bang that created the Universe. These upgraded experiments will have a good chance of finding signatures and exploring physics beyond the Standard model, be it the predicted and long awaited supersymmety or some more exotic realization of physics at a larger energy scale. The detector project is heavily interlinked with the CERN RD-42 collaboration, where progress and achievements are periodically controlled by the LHCC committee. Upgrade projects of the experiments are subject to both internal scrutiny as well as control of the respective funding agencies. The results of the proposed project bring new knowledge to detector physics and novel methods of particle detection. But most importantly, this progress in detectors enables the targeted experiment to function properly at the upgraded collider, discover signatures of New Physics and evaluate its properties. If existing, the New Physics processes would cause a large change in understanding of the structure of the world we live in. Considering an example of the supersymmetric extensions of the SM, based on the string theories. One can draw similarities in the impact that possible experimental evidence for these models would have to the one of the relativistic theory. As the latter changed the reasoning about the world by introducing a time dimension as an equivalent to the three spatial dimensions, also the supersymmetric theories would introduce ten spatial dimensions instead of the common three (additional dimensions would not be infinite as is the case with the familiar ones but rather shrunk to sizes possibly many orders of magnitude smaller than the size of the hadrons). ATLAS at the HL-LHC collider could reveal experimental evidence for the existence of new particles or refine their properties, if already discovered at the LHC.
Significance for the country
Although the proposed project is of pure basic research, it could provoke a substantial direct impact on the economy. The capital investment in the IBL project amounted to 7 million EUR and that of the ATLAS ITK - tracking detector upgrade for HL-LHC - to over 100 million EUR, excluding salaries of the collaborating researchers. Most of this investment will be spent on industrial orders. Here also the Slovenian high-tech industry could profit directly, especially if it gets involved through this project already in the prototyping phase. At the same time the newly acquired technologies can open up new business opportunities, and the supply to a CERN experiment represents an excellent reference on the high-tech market. The diamond detectors, developed in this project, can be applied to several fields outside their original scope. They can be applied for in-vivo dosimetry and internal nuclear power plant monitoring, where high temperatures prevent functioning of other detector types. High temperature electronics is another long-sought application, although issues linked to controlled doping of diamond have yet to be resolved.
Most important scientific results
Annual report
2015,
final report
Most important socioeconomically and culturally relevant results
Annual report
2014,
final report
