The ATLAS Tile Calorimeter performance in the LHC Run 2 and its upgrade towards the High-Luminosity LHC

Abstract

The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is a sampling hadronic calorimeter covering the central region of the ATLAS experiment. The TileCal uses steel as the absorber and plastic scintillators as the active medium. The scintillators are read out by wavelength shifting fibres coupled to photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). The analogue signals from the PMTs are amplified, shaped, digitized by sampling the signal every 25 ns, and stored on detector until a trigger decision is received. The TileCal front-end electronics reads out the signals produced by about 10k channels measuring energies ranging from about 30 MeV to about 2 TeV. Each stage of the signal production from scintillation light to the signal reconstruction is monitored and calibrated. A summary of the performance results using proton-proton collisions from LHC Run 2 at 13 TeV is presented. The High-Luminosity phase of the LHC, delivering up to 7.5 times the LHC nominal instantaneous luminosity, is expected to begin in 2026. The TileCal will require new electronics to meet the requirements of a 1 MHz trigger, higher ambient radiation, and to ensure better performance under high pileup conditions. Both the on- and off-detector TileCal electronics will be replaced during the shutdown of 2024-2025. PMT signals from every TileCal cell will be digitized and sent directly to the back-end electronics, where the signals are reconstructed, stored, and sent to the first level of trigger at a rate of 40 MHz. This will provide better precision for calorimeter signals used by the trigger system and will allow the development of more complex trigger algorithms. Changes to the electronics will also contribute to the data integrity and reliability of the system. The ongoing developments for on- and off-detector systems, together with expected performance characteristics and recent results of test-beam campaigns with the electronics prototypes are discussed.