The NA62 GigaTracKer: a low mass high intensity beam 4D tracker with 65 ps time resolution on tracks

TL;DR

The NA62 GigaTracKer is a high-precision, low-mass 4D silicon pixel tracker designed for high-intensity beams, achieving 65 ps time resolution and handling up to 2 MHz/mm² flux with innovative cooling and timing technologies.

Contribution

This paper introduces a novel low-mass, high-resolution 4D silicon pixel tracker with advanced cooling and timing for high-flux particle beams.

Findings

Achieved 65 ps time resolution on tracks.

Handled peak flux of 2.0 MHz/mm².

Maintained 0.5% X₀ material budget per plane.

Abstract

The GigaTracKer (GTK) is the beam spectrometer of the CERN NA62 experiment. The detector features challenging design specifications, in particular a peak particle flux reaching up to 2.0 MHz/mm$^2$, a single hit time resolution smaller than 200 ps and, a material budget of 0.5% X$_0$ per tracking plane. To fulfill these specifications, novel technologies were especially employed in the domain of silicon hybrid time-stamping pixel technology and micro-channel cooling. This article describes the detector design and reports on the achieved performance.