Abstract
The SAMpler for PICosecond time (SAMPIC) chip has been designed by a collaboration including CEA/IRFU/SEDI, Saclay and CNRS/LAL/SERDI, Orsay. It benefits from both the quick response of a time to digital converter and the versatility of a waveform digitizer to perform accurate timing measurements. Thanks to the sampled signals, smart algorithms making best use of the pulse shape can be used to improve time resolution. A software framework has been developed to analyse the SAMPIC output data and extract timing information by using either a constant fraction discriminator or a fast cross-correlation algorithm. SAMPIC timing capabilities together with the software framework have been tested using pulses generated by a signal generator or by a silicon detector illuminated by a pulsed infrared laser. Under these ideal experimental conditions, the SAMPIC chip has proven to be capable of timing resolutions down to 4ps with synthesized signals and 40ps with silicon detector signals.
Highlights
At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN [1], which is the highest energy proton-proton collider in the world with a designed center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV, special classes of events can be studied where protons are found to be intact after collisions
We present the results of various tests carried out using pulses synthesized by a signal generator and silicon detectors illuminated by a pulsed infrared laser
The SAMpler for PICosecond time (SAMPIC) chip is integrated in an out-of-the-box configuration that includes one or two mezzanine boards embedding the chip plugged on a motherboard permitting its control and readout
Summary
At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN [1], which is the highest energy proton-proton collider in the world with a designed center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV, special classes of events can be studied where protons are found to be intact after collisions These events are called “diffractive” in the case of gluon exchanges. The projects aiming to measure intact protons at high luminosity in the ATLAS and CMS/TOTEM [13] experiments are called respectively AFP (ATLAS Forward Proton detector) [14] and CT-PPS (CMS/TOTEM-Precision Proton Spectrometer) [15, 16] In this context, timing measurements are crucial in order to determine if the intact protons originate from the main hard interaction or from additional interactions in the same bunch crossing, called pileup interactions in the following.
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