Speaker
Description
The R&D activity which was needed for the required upgrade of the RPCs in view of the HL-LHC operation paves the way to the development of next-generation RPCs for general-purpose experiments at future colliders such as the Future Circular Collider (FCC) foreseen at CERN. The first big step will be the FCC-ee, which will study collisions of electron and positron beams with a center-of-mass energy between 90 and 350 GeV. The experiments at the FCC-ee will not need high rate capability due to the low background in lepton-lepton collisions. This offers an excellent opportunity for devising a stand-alone subdetector integrating the functions of charged-particle triggering, timing and tracking. This will require very good time response and time resolution, in view of detailed and highly significant checks of all the known SM processes (in particular beauty, top, and Higgs physics) and of possible and yet unknown new physics. The second big step will be the FCC-hh, which will study the collision of proton beams with a center-of-mass energy of 100 TeV, which will extend the search for new resonant states up to about 30 TeV. In this phase, high rate capability and radiation hardness will be major requirements, due to the extremely high particle pile-up in high-energy proton-proton collisions. RPCs, based on their performance in the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, where they worked fine in a high-pile-up environment, showing very good rate capability and radiation hardness, will be a natural detection technology for a muon-trigger subdetector at the FCC-hh. In summary, the RPC is a natural candidate for the next-generation charged-particle trigger subdetector in both phases of the FCC. The main features of the upgraded RPC subdetector at the HL-LHC will be discussed, and the possible use of RPCs at the FCC will be described.