Picosecond timing detectors for particle colliders

by Ryan Heller (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US))

Tuesday 15 Nov 2022, 12:30 → 13:30 Europe/Zurich

Aula U2-03 - Dipartimento di Fisica - Università di Milano-Bicocca

Though high energy colliders remain among our best pathways to discover new physics, few clues beyond the Standard Model have been uncovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) so far. Experimental progress will become more and more difficult as we look to future colliders with dense and complex environments, including the upcoming High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) and the Future Circular Collider (FCC) proposed at CERN. These colliders will deliver unprecedented rates of collisions, and as result produce hundreds or thousands of interactions nearly simultaneously, a major challenge for the detectors to disentangle. Precision timing capability at the level of tens of picoseconds can vastly simplify these environments and separate otherwise overlapping collisions.

 

To cope with the environment at the HL-LHC, the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment is constructing the MIP Timing Detector (MTD), the first timing detector at a collider to timestamp nearly every charged particle with 30-60 picosecond resolution. In the Endcap region, the MTD will rely on a novel silicon technology called Low Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGADs), which can deliver precise timing information even in the intense radiation environment near the colliding beams. In this seminar, after discussion of the basics principles of precision timing, the development of the Endcap Timing Layer will be presented, focusing on the progress made to learn to produce and operate LGAD sensors in realistic conditions. Beyond the HL-LHC, future directions for LGADs towards 4-dimensional tracking and non-collider applications will be discussed as well.

heller_LGAD_seminar_bicocca.pdf