The ATLAS Tile Calorimeter performance and its upgrade towards the High-Luminosity LHC

TL;DR

This paper reviews the performance of the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter, summarizes calibration results from 2009-2018, and discusses planned upgrades with new electronics for the High-Luminosity LHC to improve performance under increased luminosity and radiation.

Contribution

It presents the current performance, calibration methods, and detailed plans and prototype results for the TileCal upgrade for the High-Luminosity LHC.

Findings

Calibration accuracy better than 1%

Stable performance during LHC Run II

Successful testing of new electronics prototypes

Abstract

The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is a sampling hadronic calorimeter covering the central region of the ATLAS experiment. TileCal uses steel as absorber and plastic scintillators as active medium. The scintillators are read-out by the wavelength shifting fibres coupled to the photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). The analogue signals from the PMTs are amplified, shaped, digitized by sampling the signal every 25 ns and stored on detector until a trigger decision is received. The TileCal front-end electronics reads out the signals produced by about 10000 channels measuring energies ranging from about 30 MeV to about 2 TeV. Each stage of the signal production from scintillation light to the signal reconstruction is monitored and calibrated to better than 1\% using radioactive source, laser and charge injection systems. The performance of the calorimeter has been measured and monitored using calibration data, cosmic ray muons and the large sample of proton-proton collisions acquired in 2009-2018 during LHC Run I and Run II. The High-Luminosity phase of LHC, delivering five times the LHC nominal instantaneous luminosity, is expected to begin in 2028. TileCal will require new electronics to meet the requirements of a higher trigger rate, higher ambient radiation, and to ensure better performance under high pile-up conditions. Both the on- and off-detector TileCal electronics will be replaced during the shutdown of 2025-2027. New electronics prototypes were tested in laboratories as well as in beam tests. Results of the calorimeter calibration and performance during LHC Run II are summarized, the main features and beam test results obtained with the new front-end electronics are also presented.