Performance of the ATLAS Hadronic Tile Calorimeter Demonstrator system for the Phase-II upgrade facing the High-Luminosity LHC era

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and testing of a new, upgraded ATLAS Tile Calorimeter system designed to operate efficiently in the high-radiation, high-luminosity environment of the HL-LHC, including a demonstrator prototype tested in real conditions.

Contribution

The paper introduces a state-of-the-art, radiation-hard, modular electronics upgrade for the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter, including a hybrid demonstrator prototype tested in situ.

Findings

Successful integration of the demonstrator prototype in ATLAS in 2019

Enhanced electronics capable of handling increased data rates and radiation levels

Validation of the upgraded system's performance in real collider conditions

Abstract

The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) will have a peak luminosity of $5\times10^{34} $cm$^{-2} $\,s$^{-1}$, five times higher than the design luminosity of the LHC. The hadronic ATLAS Tile Calorimeter TileCal) is a sampling calorimeter with steel as absorber and plastic scintillators as active medium. The light produced in the scintillating tiles is guided to photomultiplier tubes (PMTs), where analogue signals are produced to be shaped and conditioned before being digitized every 25\,ns. TileCal Phase-II Upgrade for the HL-LHC will allow the system can cope with the increased radiation levels and out of time pileup. The upgraded system will digitize and send all the calorimeter sampled signals to the off-detector systems, where the events will be reconstructed and shipped to the first level of trigger, all at 40\,MHz rate. Consequently, development of more complex trigger algorithms will be possible with the more precise calorimeter signals provided to the trigger system. The new hardware comprises state of the art electronics with a redundant design and radiation hard electronics to avoid single points of failure, in addition to multi-Gbps optical links for the high volume of data transmission and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to drive the logic functions of the off- and on-detector electronics. A hybrid demonstrator prototype module containing the new calorimeter module electronics, but still compatible with the present system was assembled and inserted in ATLAS during June 2019, so that the Phase-II system can be tested in real ATLAS conditions.