Mauricio Feo Pereira Rivello de Carvalho, PhD at Nikhef, will defend his thesis Tuesday 10 October 2023 at 15.30 at the University of Groningen.
“A SciFi tracker for the LHCb experiment”
The quest to understand the prevalence of matter over antimatter in the observable universe drives the Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb) Experiment at CERN, situated beneath the France-Switzerland border. This thesis focuses on a detector upgrade crucial to enhance the sensitivity of the LHCb Experiment. A key ingredient of this upgrade is the Scintillating Fiber Detector (SciFi) Tracker.
The introduction of the SciFi replaced key components like the Outer and Inner Tracker, improving tracking efficiency and spatial resolution. To ensure SciFi’s radiation resilience, comprehensive tests were conducted, that revealed effects on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), including speed degradation, leakage current, re-programmability loss, Single Event Upsets (SEU), and Single Event Latch-ups (SEL).
Results indicated that speed degradation, leakage current, and SELs were manageable during the detector’s lifetime. However, FPGAs became unprogrammable after a certain radiation exposure, necessitating operational planning. Mitigation strategies, like triple modular redundancy, reduced SEUs to an acceptable level.Mass-produced SciFi modules and readout electronics underwent their first particle beam test, allowing optimization of operating parameters of the front-end electronics, such as clustering coefficients, thresholds, and shaper settings.
Resolution analysis demonstrated compliance with detector specifications. With an efficiency surpassing 99\% and a spatial resolution better than 70 µm, SciFi is validated for LHCb operation. As SciFi is commissioned, the configurations explored in this thesis offer valuable insights for optimizing the detector during commissioning and beyond.
A SciFi tracker for the LHCb experiment (pdf)
The PhD defense will take place on Tuesday 10 October 2023 at 15.30 in the Academiegebouw RUG, Broerstraat 5, 9712 CP Groningen.
More information on the website of the University of Groningen.
Supervisor: prof. dr. A. Pellegrino