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At least 217 records · Page 12
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Test Beam Results of Planar Pixel Sensor for the CMS Phase 2 Inner Tracker Upgrade

Results of the test beam measurements that characterise the performance of CMS Readout Chip (CROC) sensors to be used in the High Luminosity era of the Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) are presented. The HL-LHC peak instantaneous luminosity of $7.5 \times 10^{34} \ \text{cm}^{-2} s^{-1}$ corresponds to an average of around 200 inelastic proton-proton collisions per beam-crossing every 25 ns. In order to efficiently reconstruct and track particles in this extreme and challenging conditions, the present CMS tracking detector will be completely replaced. The new tracking detector consists of an Inner Tracker closest to the beamline and an Outer Tracker surrounding it. These are populated with modules that comprise of readout chips and silicon sensors. The test beam measurements of these modules are vital to understand the performance of the related technologies. Using a primary 120 GeV proton beam from the Main Injector at Fermilab, data was collected at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility (FTBF) using the silicon tracker telescope that provides a precision position measurement of the track impact point with less than 5 $\mu$m uncertainty. The proton beam was incident on a 1x2 planar CROC module developed by Hamamatsu. The sensor has 100x25 $\mu m^2$ standard pixels and also a smaller number of 225x25 $\mu m^2$ longer pixels at the boundary between the two ROCs. We present characterization of these modules that includes pixel efficiency, resolution, cluster size and charge distributions.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Search for Fractionally Charged Particles in Proton-Proton Collisions at $\sqrt{𝑠}$ = 13 TeV

A search is presented for fractionally charged particles with charges below 1⁢𝑒, using their small energy loss in the tracking detector as a key variable to observe a signal. The analyzed dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb −1 of proton-proton collisions collected at $\sqrt{𝑠}$ = 13 TeV in 2016–2018 at the CERN LHC. This is the first search at the LHC for new particles with a charge between 𝑒/3 and 0.9⁢𝑒, including an extension of previous results at a charge of 2⁢𝑒/3. Masses up to 640 GeV and charges as low as 𝑒/3 are excluded at 95% confidence level. These are the most stringent limits to date for the considered Drell-Yan-like production mode.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Solid State Detectors Dedicated to Fast Timing

Development and implementation of 4D-trackers will play a key role at future machines. These detectors will reduce backgrounds, improve track reconstruction and Level-1triggering, and enable new capabilities for particle identification and reconstruction of long-lived particles. All of these pose unique challenges and opportunities to detector design. In this talk I will overview the currently available technologies and areas of active R&D, and proposed disruptive technologies to achieve the goals for future experiments.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
NASA NTRS1993

LET spectra measurements of charged particles in the P0006 experiment on LDEF

Measurements are under way of the charged particle radiation environment of the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) satellite using stacks of plastic nuclear track detectors (PNTD's) placed in different locations of the satellite. In the initial work the charge, energy, and linear energy transfer (LET) spectra of charged particles were measured with CR-39 double layer PNTD's located on the west side of the satellite (Experiment P0006). Primary and secondary stopping heavy ions were measured separately from the more energetic particles. Both trapped and galactic cosmic ray (GCR) particles are included, with the latter component being dominated by relativistic iron particles. The results from the P0006 experiment will be compared with similar measurements in other locations on LDEF with different orientation and shielding conditions. The remarkably detailed investigation of the charged particle radiation environment of the LDEF satellite will lead to a better understanding of the radiation environment of the Space Station Freedom. It will enable more accurate prediction of single event upsets (SEU's) in microelectronics and, especially, more accurate assessment of the risk - contributed by different components of the radiation field (GCR's, trapped protons, secondaries and heavy recoils, etc.) - to the health and safety of crew members.

Benton, E. V.↗
DOE OSTI2021

Response of CR-39 nuclear track detectors to protons with non-normal incidence

This paper presents data from experiments with protons at non-normal incidence to CR-39 nuclear track detectors, analyzing the properties of detection efficiency, proton track diameter, track contrast, and track eccentricity. Understanding the CR-39 response to protons incident at an angle is important for designing charged particle detectors for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) applications. This study considers protons with incident energies less than 3 MeV. In this regime, an incident angle of 10° has no effect on CR-39 detection efficiency, and >85% detection efficiency is preserved up through 25° in the range of 1.0 MeV–2.1 MeV. For ICF applications, incident angles above 30° are deemed impractical for detector design due to significant drops in proton detection at all energies. We observe significant reductions in detection efficiency compared to theoretical predictions, particularly at low energies where proton tracks are etched away. The proton track diameter measured by the scan system is observed to decrease with higher incident angles. The track diameters are analyzed with two fitting models, and it is shown that the diameter–energy relation can be fit with the existing models at angles up to 30° . The optical contrast of the tracks tends to increase with the angle, meaning that the tracks are fainter, and a larger increase is observed for higher energies. Eccentricity, a measure of how elongated proton tracks are, increases with the incident angle and drops after the critical angle. The lowest energy tracks remain nearly circular even at higher angles.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Response of CR-39 nuclear track detectors to protons with non-normal incidence

This paper presents data from experiments with protons at non-normal incidence to CR-39 nuclear track detectors, analyzing the properties of detection efficiency, proton track diameter, track contrast, and track eccentricity. Understanding the CR-39 response to protons incident at an angle is important for designing charged particle detectors for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) applications. This study considers protons with incident energies less than 3 MeV. In this regime, an incident angle of 10° has no effect on CR-39 detection efficiency, and >85% detection efficiency is preserved up through 25° in the range of 1.0 MeV–2.1 MeV. For ICF applications, incident angles above 30° are deemed impractical for detector design due to significant drops in proton detection at all energies. We observe significant reductions in detection efficiency compared to theoretical predictions, particularly at low energies where proton tracks are etched away. The proton track diameter measured by the scan system is observed to decrease with higher incident angles. The track diameters are analyzed with two fitting models, and it is shown that the diameter–energy relation can be fit with the existing models at angles up to 30°. The optical contrast of the tracks tends to increase with the angle, meaning that the tracks are fainter, and a larger increase is observed for higher energies. Eccentricity, a measure of how elongated proton tracks are, increases with the incident angle and drops after the critical angle. The lowest energy tracks remain nearly circular even at higher angles.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
NASA NTRS2023

CEPS – A Compact Electron-Proton Spectrometer

Small mass/low-power sensors are needed for autonomous Moon/Mars surface ops that provide alerts to impending adverse space weather conditions. In order to use current operational forecasting tools, a sensor capable of measuring both high-energy electrons and protons is needed. By combining high-TRL Timepix technology with a CdTe layer, this project leverages known technology to fill a critical gap for surface operations. Typical space weather sensors are at least an order of magnitude higher in mass than is expected from Timepix-based devices and are deployed on robotic assets away from human crews. High fidelity measurements at the crew location and subsequent ability are needed to provide warnings to crews to shelter with a device that can easily be carried on the Lunar and Martian surfaces.​ The aim of this project is the development of compact, low power space weather sensors for crew protection based on the combination of AES flight heritage Timepix hardware with novel CdTe (Cadmium Telluride) sensors. CdTe technology has only recently matured to a point where it can be reliably used with Timepix detectors. These detectors will be able to measure electron spectra in an energy range relevant to the RELEASE model, which is used operationally by NASA to provide crew early warning of Solar Energetic Particle Events as well as protons in the energy ranges relevant to human health allowing for event ‘nowcasting’ and total event crew dose prediction. Compared to existing solutions these detectors will be compact enough to travel with crew, providing a significant advantage to space environment situation awareness. Project results indicate that CdTe-based Timepix sensors respond well to energetic electrons, and particle tracks are sufficiently distinct to be able to measure in a mixed radiation field. Detector response functions were developed for both electrons and protons. Measurement results showed response to both electrons and protons in the energy range of interest for human space flight.

Radiation↗
DOE OSTI2023

End-to-End Pipeline for Trigger Detection on Hit and Track Graphs

There has been a surge of interest in applying deep learning in particle and nuclear physics to replace labor-intensive offline data analysis with automated online machine learning tasks. This paper details a novel AI-enabled triggering solution for physics experiments in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and future Electron-Ion Collider. The triggering system consists of a comprehensive end-to-end pipeline based on Graph Neural Networks that classifies trigger events versus background events, makes online decisions to retain signal data, and enables efficient data acquisition. Here, the triggering system first starts with the coordinates of pixel hits lit up by passing particles in the detector, applies three stages of event processing (hits clustering, track reconstruction, and trigger detection), and labels all processed events with the binary tag of trigger versus background events. By switching among different objective functions, we train the Graph Neural Networks in the pipeline to solve multiple tasks: the edge-level track reconstruction problem, the edge-level track adjacency matrix prediction, and the graph-level trigger detection problem. We propose a novel method to treat the events as track-graphs instead of hit-graphs. This method focuses on intertrack relations and is driven by underlying physics processing. As a result, it attains a solid performance (around 72% accuracy) for trigger detection and outperforms the baseline method using hit-graphs by 2% higher accuracy.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
NASA NTRS2002

Albedo in the ATIC Experiment

ATIC(Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter) is a balloon borne experiment designed to measure the cosmic ray composition for elements from hydrogen to iron and their energy spectra from approx.50 GeV to near 100 TeV. It consists of a Si-matrix detector to determine the charge of a CR particle, a scintillator hodoscope for tracking, carbon interaction targets and a fully active BGO calorimeter. ATIC had its first 16-day flight from McMurdo, Antarctica from 28/12/2000 to 13/01/2000. The ATIC flight collected approximately 25 million events. To measure charge of primary particle in presence of radiation scattered back from the interaction and subsequent shower development in the calorimeter a charge detector must be a mosaic of small detector pads so that the pad containing the signal from the incident particle has no additional signal from albedo particles. Therefore the silicon matrix was built of 4480 individual silicon pads each 2 cm x 1.5 cm. The matrix consists of four planes of detectors and the active detector area, in these planes are partially overlapped to completely cover the aperture. The lateral and amplitude distributions of albedo signals in Si-matrix are analyzed for different primary nuclei and different energy deposits in BGO calorimeter. The greater part of albedo signals has Q near 1, where Q = square root of Amplitude(MIP). The albedo distribution exponentially decreases up to Q near 8. These high values are produced by slow protons and plans. There are also a small number of signals of Q > 8, mainly for heavy nucleus primaries. These signals are apparently generated by neutrons. The comparison of the experimental data and simulations with GEANT 3-21 code using QGSM generator for nucleus-nucleus interactions is presented.

Sokolskaya, N. V.↗
DOE OSTI2020

The Heavy Photon Search (HPS) Software Environment

The Heavy Photon Search (HPS) is an experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) designed to search for a hidden sector photon (A’) in fixed-target electro-production. It uses a silicon microstrip tracking and vertexing detector placed inside a dipole magnet to measure charged particle trajectories and a fast lead-tungstate crystal calorimeter located just downstream of the magnet to provide a trigger and to identify electromagnetic showers. The HPS experiment uses both invariant mass and secondary vertex signatures to search for the A’. The experimental collaboration is small and quite heterogeneous: it is composed of members of the nuclear physics as well as particle physics communities, from universities and national labs from around the US and Europe. Enabling such a disparate group to concentrate on the physics aspects of the experiment required that the software be easy to install and use, and having such limited manpower meant that existing solutions had to be exploited. HPS has successfully completed two engineering runs and completed its first physics run in the summer of 2019. We begin with an overview of the physics goals of the experiment followed by a short description of the detector design. We then describe the software tools used to design the detector layout and simulate the expected detector performance. Event reconstruction involving track, cluster and vertex finding and fitting for both simulated and real data was, to first order, adopted from existing software originally developed for Linear Collider studies. Bringing it all together into a cohesive whole involved the use of multiple software solutions with common interfaces.

Graf, Norman↗
DOE OSTI2020

Development of a FELIX based readout system for ITk strip hybrid module demonstrator for ATLAS Phase-II Upgrade

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will undergo a major upgrade around 2024 with a roughly tenfold increase in luminosity. It results in corresponding increases in particle rates and radiation doses that the current ATLAS Inner Tracking Detector cannot cope with. Therefore the ATLAS experiment will build a new all-silicon tracking system called the ITk (Inner Tracker) that includes an inside pixel detector close to the beam line and a strip detector in outside layer. Meanwhile the ATLAS experiment will adopt the Front-End Link eXchange (FELIX) system as the interface between the data acquisition and front-end electronics for all sub-detectors in the Phase II Upgrade. In this contribution, we present a prototype of FELIX based readout system for the strip hybrid module. Its hardware, firmware and software GUI application will be discussed, as well as integration test results.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Classification Algorithm for Dark Matter Search using Skipper-CCD

In this project, I used ROOT framework with C++ for data analysis and Geant4 for simulating different particles’ interaction with the detector to study the characteristic of their tracks. I prepared the tagged dataset for machine learning training both the real experiment data taken in MINOS and simulation data from Geant4.

Chen, Meng-Wei↗
DOE OSTI2020

CACTUS: A depleted monolithic active timing sensor using a CMOS radiation hard technology

The planned luminosity increase at the Large Hadron Collider in the coming years has triggered interest in the use of the particles' time of arrival as additional information in specialized detectors to mitigate the impact of pile-up. The required time resolution is of the order of tens of picoseconds, with a spatial granularity of the order of 1 mm. A time measurement at this precision level will also be of interest beyond the LHC and beyond high energy particle physics. We present in this paper the first developments towards a radiation hard Depleted Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (DMAPS), with high-resolution time measurement capability. The technology chosen is a standard high voltage CMOS process, in conjunction with a high resistivity detector material, which has already proven to efficiently detect particles in tracking applications after several hundred of Mrad of irradiation.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2021

A Comparative Study of Straight-Strip and Zigzag-Interleaved Anode Patterns for MPGD Readouts

Due to their simplicity and versatility of design, straight strip or rectangular pad anode structures are frequently employed with micro-pattern gas detectors to reconstruct high precision space points for various tracking applications. The particle impact point is typically determined by interpolating the charge collected by several neighboring strips. However, to effectively extract the inherent positional information, the lateral spacing of the straight strips must be comparable to or preferably smaller than the full extent of the incident charge cloud. In contrast, highly interleaved anode patterns, such as zigzags, can adequately sample the incident charge with a pitch appreciably larger than the charge cloud.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Advanced silicon tracking detector developments for the future Electron-Ion Collider

The proposed Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will operate high-luminosity high-energy electron+proton and electron+nucleus collisions at the collision energies from 20 GeV to 141 GeV to solve several fundamental questions in the high energy and nuclear physics fields. Its instantaneous luminosity can reach 10 33-34 cm -2 s -1 and the bunching crossing rate is around 10 ns. The EIC project has received CD1 approval from the US DOE in 2021 and moves toward the machine design and preparation for construction. To realize various particle measurements with high precision at the future EIC, a low material-budget and high-granularity silicon vertex and tracking detector with fine spatial and momentum resolutions and nearly 4π solid angle coverage is desired. The Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS) and AC Coupled Low Gain Avalanche Diode (AC-LGAD) technologies stand out of several advanced technology options for the EIC silicon vertex and tracking detector subsystems. The MAPS technology has advanced features of low material budget, low power consumption, good radiation resistance and fine spatial resolution. The AC-LGAD technology can achieve fast timing resolution. Latest studies and progress of the EIC silicon vertex and tracking detector conceptual design, performance validations in simulation and ongoing MAPS and AC-LGAD R&D will be shown. Furthermore, schedule and plan of the EIC project detector development will be discussed as well.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2023

Observation of the $γγ → ττ$ Process in $\mathrm{Pb + Pb}$ Collisions and Constraints on the $\tau$-Lepton Anomalous Magnetic Moment with the ATLAS Detector

This Letter reports the observation of τ-lepton pair production in ultraperipheral lead-lead collisions, Pb+Pb→Pb(γγ→ττ)Pb, and constraints on the τ-lepton anomalous magnetic moment, a τ . The dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 1.44 nb -1 of LHC Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ =5.02 TeV recorded by the ATLAS experiment in 2018. Selected events contain one muon from a τ-lepton decay, an electron or charged-particle track(s) from the other τ-lepton decay, little additional central-detector activity, and no forward neutrons. The γγ→ττ process is observed in Pb+Pb collisions with a significance exceeding 5 standard deviations, and a signal strength of μ ττ =1.03$^{+0.06}_{-0.05}$ assuming the Standard Model value for a τ . To measure a τ , a template fit to the muon transverse-momentum distribution from τ-lepton candidates is performed, using a dimuon (γγ→μμ) control sample to constrain systematic uncertainties. The observed 95% confidence-level interval for aτ is -0.057 < a τ < 0.024.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2026

ELECTRON SHOWER RECONSTRUCTION IN THE ICARUS EXPERIMENT

This dissertation presents a study in the field of neutrino physics. Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are electrically neutral and have extremely small mass, allowing them to traverse matter with very little interaction. Because of this property, neutrinos are exceptionally difficult to detect. Nevertheless, understanding their behavior is essential for addressing fundamental questions about the origin of the Universe and the properties of matter. This work focuses on the reconstruction of electron showers produced by interactions of electron neutrinos (𝜈𝑒) in the ICARUS experiment, located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the United States. ICARUS employs a liquid argon time projection chamber detector, which is capable of recording with high precision the tracks left by particles produced in neutrino interactions. The main objective of this research is to improve the reconstruction algorithms and techniques used to identify and characterize these electron showers, enhancing metrics such as completeness, defined as the fraction of correctly reconstructed signals, and purity, which quantifies how much of the reconstructed signal truly belongs to the candidate event. These improvements are crucial for reducing false positives and increasing the accuracy of electron photon discrimination. Consequently, this work directly contributes to improved neutrino oscillation analyses and to a deeper understanding of neutrino properties.

Salmoria, Gabrieli [Parana Tech. Fed. U., Toledo]↗