Speaker
Description
The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is a sampling hadronic calorimeter covering the central region of the ATLAS experiment with steel as the absorber and plastic scintillators as the active medium. Scintillators are read out by wavelength shifting fibers coupled to photomultiplier tubes (PMTs), positioned at the outermost part of the modules. TileCal is crucial for detecting hadronic particles, discriminating muons, electrons and photons, and measuring hadronic particle energy and transverse missing momentum.
The upcoming High-Luminosity phase of the LHC, starting in 2030, will increase the nominal instantaneous luminosity by a factor of five, alongside an upgraded ATLAS Trigger and Data AcQuisition architecture. This upgrade necessitates a complete redesign of the readout electronics and power systems of TileCal. Additionally, 10% of the most exposed PMTs will be replaced with a new model.
The on- and off-detector TileCal electronics will be replaced during the Long Shutdown from 2026 to 2030 to handle a 40 MHz input rate, a 1 MHz trigger output rate, and harsher radiation and pile-up conditions. The upgrade involves digitizing signals from each TileCal cell and directly transmitting them to off-detector electronics at every bunch crossing. Once received off-detector, signals are reconstructed, stored, and forwarded to the first trigger level system at a 40 MHz rate. This upgrade improves calorimeter signal precision for the trigger system, enabling the development of more effective trigger algorithms.
The modular front-end electronics incorporate radiation-tolerant Commercial Off-The-Shelf components and a redundant design to mitigate single points of failure. The timing, control, and communication interface with off-detector electronics utilizes modern Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and high-speed fiber optic links operating at up to 9.6 Gb/s.
The TileCal upgrade program has involved extensive research and development, including test beam studies and the construction of a Demonstrator module. The Tile Demonstrator was integrated into ATLAS in July 2019 for testing in real detector conditions, while ensuring fully compatibility with the current ATLAS Trigger and Data AcQuisition system. This presentation will outline recent progress in the development of the on- and off-detector systems, expected performance characteristics, and results from test-beam campaigns featuring the latest electronics prototypes will be presented.
