The Timepix Telescope for high performance particle tracking

Abstract

20The Timepix particle tracking telescope has been developed as part of the LHCb VELO Upgrade project, supported by the Medipix Collaboration and the AIDA framework. It is a primary piece of infrastructure for the VELO Upgrade project and is being used for the development of new sensors and front end technologies for several upcoming LHC trackers and vertexing systems. The telescope is designed around the dual capability of the Timepix ASICs to provide information 25 about either the deposited charge or the timing information from tracks traversing the 14×14 mm matrix of 55 × 55 µm pixels. The rate of reconstructed tracks available is optimised by taking advantage of the shutter driver readout architecture of the Timepix chip, operated with existing readout systems. Results of tests conducted in the SPS North Area beam facility at CERN show that the telescope typically provides reconstructed track rates during the beam spills of 30 between 3.5 and 7.5 kHz, depending on beam conditions. The tracks are time stamped with 1 ns resolution with an efficiency of above 98% and provide a pointing resolution at the centre of the telescope of ∼1.6 µm . By dropping the time stamping requirement the rate can be increased to ∼15 kHz, at the expense of a small increase in background. The telescope infrastructure provides CO 2 cooling and a flexible mechanical interface to the device under test, and has been used for 35 a wide range of measurements during the 2011-2012 data taking campaigns.

LHCb VELO Timepix3 telescope

“…No such structure exists in the PS and SPS secondary beams, where there is a continuous time profile during the flat top of a spill, which typically lasts about 4.5 seconds for the CERN SPS. In contrast to frame-based telescopes [3], the Timepix3 telescope data does not have an inherent event structure due to the data-driven readout described in section 3. Because the typical dataset of a run is hundreds of MBytes it is impractical to process the entire run in a single pass.…”

“…The cluster resolution values so obtained are used as inputs to a fast Monte Carlo simulation similar to the one described in Ref. [3]. The simulation gives as output the expected biased residual distributions at each plane, which are the track-cluster residuals measured at each plane for tracks which use clusters from all 8 planes.…”

The LHCb VELO upgrade

“…It is based on the existing TimePix telescope [5]. The telescope is comprised of 8 telescope planes divided between two arms with a Device-under-Test (DUT) in the centre.…”

Probing active-edge silicon sensors using a high precision telescope

“…The telescope [4] consisted of eight Timepix [5] detectors with 300 μm thick sensors equally divided into two arms with an additional ninth plane providing timing information. The device under test (DUT) was mounted on a computer controlled translation and rotation stage which allowed translations in transverse directions to the beam in steps of 1 μm, as well as 0.01 of a degree accurate rotations.…”

“…4 Looking at the cross-section of such an active-edge sensor in TCAD simulations [8] we can visualize this distortion of the electric field pattern. The PTE distance and the edge implant are depicted in Fig.…”