Hadron beam test of a scintillating fibre tracker system for elastic scattering and luminosity measurement in ATLAS

TL;DR

This paper reports on beam tests of a scintillating fibre tracker designed for elastic scattering and luminosity measurement in ATLAS, demonstrating its effective performance in high-energy hadron beams similar to LHC conditions.

Contribution

It presents the validation of a novel scintillating fibre tracker system with custom electronics for precise elastic scattering measurements at CERN.

Findings

Adequate tracking performance in high-energy hadron beams

Successful alignment method with expected precision

Validation of detector design in realistic LHC-like conditions

Abstract

A scintillating fibre tracker is proposed to measure elastic proton scattering at very small angles in the ATLAS experiment at CERN. The tracker will be located in so-called Roman Pot units at a distance of 240 m on each side of the ATLAS interaction point. An initial validation of the design choices was achieved in a beam test at DESY in a relatively low energy electron beam and using slow off-the-shelf electronics. Here we report on the results from a second beam test experiment carried out at CERN, where new detector prototypes were tested in a high energy hadron beam, using the first version of the custom designed front-end electronics. The results show an adequate tracking performance under conditions which are similar to the situation at the LHC. In addition, the alignment method using so-called overlap detectors was studied and shown to have the expected precision.