# Diamond Detectors for the TOTEM Timing Upgrade

## TL;DR

This paper details the design, implementation, and performance of a diamond-based timing detector for the TOTEM experiment at the LHC, enabling precise proton TOF measurements to improve vertex association in high pileup conditions.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel diamond detector with 50 ps timing precision for the TOTEM upgrade, including custom electronics and waveform sampling techniques.

## Key findings

- Achieved about 50 ps time resolution with the diamond detector.
- Successfully integrated the detector into the LHC environment in 2015.
- Enhanced capability to tag central diffractive events at high pileup.

## Abstract

This paper describes the design and the performance of the timing detector developed by the TOTEM Collaboration for the Roman Pots (RPs) to measure the Time-Of-Flight (TOF) of the protons produced in central diffractive interactions at the LHC. The measurement of the TOF of the protons allows the determination of the longitudinal position of the proton interaction vertex and its association with one of the vertices reconstructed by the CMS detectors. The TOF detector is based on single crystal Chemical Vapor Deposition (scCVD) diamond plates and is designed to measure the protons TOF with about 50 ps time precision. This upgrade to the TOTEM apparatus will be used in the LHC run 2 and will tag the central diffractive events up to an interaction pileup of about 1. A dedicated fast and low noise electronics for the signal amplification has been developed. The digitization of the diamond signal is performed by sampling the waveform. After introducing the physics studies that will most profit from the addition of these new detectors, we discuss in detail the optimization and the performance of the first TOF detector installed in the LHC in November 2015.