Operational experience with the NA62 Gigatracker

Abstract

The Gigatracker is a hybrid silicon pixel detector developed for the NA62 experiment at CERN, which aims at measuring the branching fraction of the ultra-rare kaon decay K + → π + νν at the CERN SPS. The detector has to track particles in a 75 GeV/c hadron beam with a flux reaching 1.3 MHz/mm 2 and provide single-hit timing with better than 200 ps r.m.s. resolution for a total material budget of less than 0.5% X 0 per station. The tracker comprises three 61×27 mm 2 stations installed in vacuum (about 10 −6 mbar) and cooled with liquid C 6 F 14 circulating through microchannels etched inside few hundred of microns thick silicon plates. Each station is composed of a 200 µm thick planar silicon sensor bump-bonded to 2×5 custom 100 µm thick ASIC, called TDCpix. Each chip contains 40×45 asynchronous pixels, each 300×300 µm 2 and is instrumented with 720 time-to-digital converter channels with 100 ps bin. In order to cope with the high rate, the TDCpix is equipped with four 3.2 Gb/s serializers sending out the data. Detector description, operational experience and results from the NA62 experimental runs will be presented.

On the Usage of Precision Timing Detectors in High Rate and High Pileup Environments

“…demonstrated by the the NA62 silicon tracker [12,13]. As discussed in the case of precision timing calorimeters in Sec.…”

Single-photon imaging detector with 𝒪(10) ps timing and sub-10 μm position resolutions

“…For example, new needs in the field of detectors for high-energy physics (HEP) experiments, due to the ever-increasing particles interaction rate, have led to the development and construction of detectors capable of measuring simultaneously and with excellent resolution the position and time of incoming charged particles. State-of-the-art of such detectors is represented by the Gigatracker [2], which is installed and operational in the NA62 experiment at CERN since a few years [3]. A new concept in silicon sensor technology has allowed to reach tens of picosecond timing resolution with the so-called low gain avalanche diodes [4], which will be employed in the next generation of high-energy physics experiments as e.g.…”