LHCb will commence data taking as the first dedicated heavy flavour experiment at a hadron collider in 2008. A very high hit precision from its vertex detector (VELO) is essential to meet the tight requirements of vertex reconstruction in B-physics. The single hit precision of the VELO is better than 10 micron. However, the VELO is operated only 8 mm from the beam and must be retracted and reinserted each LHC fill. Hence, the detector places unique demands on its alignment algorithm. The partially assembled VELO system has already been tested in a beam test. The novel software alignment methods are presented together with their interplay with the metrology measurements. Results from Monte Carlo simulation studies are discussed and recent beam test results are shown that prove the method's precision at the micron level.
LHCb is an experiment dedicated to the study of new physics in the decays of beauty and charm hadrons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The Vertex Locator (VELO) is the silicon detector surrounding the LHCb interaction point. The detector operates in a severe and highly non-uniform radiation environment. The small pitch and analogue readout result in a best single hit precision of 4 $\rm μ$m. The upgrade of the LHCb experiment, planned for 2018, will transform the entire readout to a trigger-less system operating at 40 MHz event rate. The vertex detector will have to cope with radiat…
The LHCb experiment is set for a significant upgrade, which will be ready for Run 3 of the LHC in 2020. This upgrade will allow LHCb to run at a significantly higher instantaneous luminosity and collect an integrated luminosity of $50\,\text{fb}^{-1}$ by the end of Run 4. In this process the Vertex locator (VELO) detector will be upgraded to a pixel-based silicon detector. The upgraded VELO will improve upon the current detector by being closer to the beam and having lower material modules with microchannel cooling and a thinner RF-foil. Simulations have shown that it will maintain its excelle…
The LHCb Vertex Locator contains 42 silicon sensor modules. Each module has two silicon sensors. A method for determining the relative alignment of the silicon sensors within each module from data is presented. The software implementation details are discussed. Monte-Carlo simulation studies are described that demonstrate an alignment precision of 1.3 micron is obtained in the sensor plane.
Precise knowledge of the location of the material in the LHCb vertex locator (VELO) is essential to reducing background in searches for long-lived exotic particles, and in identifying jets that originate from beauty and charm quarks. Secondary interactions of hadrons produced in beam-gas collisions are used to map the location of material in the VELO. Using this material map, along with properties of a reconstructed secondary vertex and its constituent tracks, a $p$-value can be assigned to the hypothesis that the secondary vertex originates from a material interaction. A validation of this pr…
The LHCb Vertex Locator (VELO) is a silicon strip detector designed to reconstruct charged particle trajectories and vertices produced at the LHCb interaction region. During the first two years of data collection, the 84 VELO sensors have been exposed to a range of fluences up to a maximum value of approximately $\rm{45 \times 10^{12}\,1\,MeV}$ neutron equivalent ($\rm{1\,MeV\,n_{eq}}$). At the operational sensor temperature of approximately $-7\,^{\circ}\rm{C}$, the average rate of sensor current increase is $18\,\upmu\rm{A}$ per $\rm{fb^{-1}}$, in excellent agreement with predictions. The si…
The thermal properties of the LHCb Vertex Locator (VELO) are studied using the real-time detector alignment procedure. The variation of the position and orientation of the detector elements as a function of the operating temperature of the VELO is presented. This study uses a dataset collected by the LHCb experiment during a VELO temperature scan performed at the end of LHC Run 2 (October 2018). Significant shrinkage of the VELO modules is observed at the operating temperature of $-30^\circ$ compared to the laboratory measurements on a single module taken at a range of temperatures from $+45^\…
An extensive sensor testing campaign is presented, dedicated to measuring the charge collection properties of prototype candidates for the Vertex Locator (VELO) detector for the upgraded LHCb experiment. The charge collection is measured with sensors exposed to fluences of up to $8 \times 10^{15}~1~\mathrm{\,Me\kern -0.1em V}~ \mathrm{ \,n_{eq}}~{\mathrm{ \,cm}}^{-2}$, as well as with nonirradiated prototypes. The results are discussed, including the influence of different levels of irradiation and bias voltage on the charge collection properties. Charge multiplication is observed on some sens…
The Vertex Locator (VELO) is a silicon microstrip detector that surrounds the proton-proton interaction region in the LHCb experiment. The performance of the detector during the first years of its physics operation is reviewed. The system is operated in vacuum, uses a bi-phase CO2 cooling system, and the sensors are moved to 7 mm from the LHC beam for physics data taking. The performance and stability of these characteristic features of the detector are described, and details of the material budget are given. The calibration of the timing and the data processing algorithms that are implemented…
LHCb is the dedicated heavy flavour experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The partially assembled silicon vertex locator (VELO) of the LHCb experiment has been tested in a beam test. The data from this beam test have been used to determine the performance of the VELO alignment algorithm. The relative alignment of the two silicon sensors in a module and the relative alignment of the modules has been extracted. This alignment is shown to be accurate at a level of approximately 2 micron and 0.1 mrad for translations and rotations, respectively in the plane of the sensors. A single hit …
LHCb is one of the four main experiments of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project, which will start at CERN in 2008. The experiment is primarily dedicated to B-Physics and hence requires precise vertex reconstruction. The silicon vertex locator (VELO) has a single hit precision of better than 10 micron and is used both off-line and in the trigger. These requirements place strict constraints on its alignment. Additional challenges for the alignment arise from the detector being retracted between each fill of the LHC and from its unique circular disc r/phi strip geometry. This paper describes …
LHC will offer the opportunity of probing the mass scale of the electro-weak symmetry breaking. Thus we expect to uncover direct manifestations of physics beyond the Standard Model, which will raise new questions that may be elucidated by precision measurements of beauty and charm decays. The LHCb experiment is poised to pursue this ambitious program as soon as LHC turns on. An upgrade to enhance its physics sensitivity by at least one order of magnitude is critical to the completion of this study, as new physics effects may be subtle. A new vertex detector is a crucial element of this project…
LHCb is a forward spectrometer experiment dedicated to the study of new physics in the decays of beauty and charm hadrons produced in proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The VErtex LOcator (VELO) is the microstrip silicon detector surrounding the interaction point, providing tracking and vertexing measurements. The upgrade of the LHCb experiment, planned for 2018, will increase the luminosity up to $\rm 2\times10^{33}\ cm^{-2}s^{-1}$ and will perform the readout as a trigger-less system with an event rate of 40 MHz. Extremely non-uniform radiation doses will reach up …
The extreme radiation dose received by vertex detectors at the Large Hadron Collider dictates stringent requirements on their cooling systems. To be robust against radiation damage, sensors should be maintained below -20 degree C and at the same time, the considerable heat load generated in the readout chips and the sensors must be removed. Evaporative CO2 cooling using microchannels etched in a silicon plane in thermal contact with the readout chips is an attractive option. In this paper, we present the first results of microchannel prototypes with circulating, two-phase CO2 and compare them …
The upgrade of the LHCb experiment, scheduled for LHC Run-III, scheduled to start in 2021, will transform the experiment to a trigger-less system reading out the full detector at 40 MHz event rate. All data reduction algorithms will be executed in a high-level software farm enabling the detector to run at luminosities of $2\times10^{33} \mathrm{cm}^{-2}\mathrm{s}^{-1}$. The Vertex Locator (VELO) is the silicon vertex detector surrounding the interaction region. The current detector will be replaced with a hybrid pixel system equipped with electronics capable of reading out at 40 MHz. The upgra…
The high resolution of the LHCb vertex detector makes it possible to perform precise measurements of the vertex positions of beam-gas and beam-beam interactions. With these measurements beam parameters such as width and position can be measured. A novel method for determining the absolute luminosity at the LHC using the directly measured beam parameters is presented. The data taken in 2009 is used to illustrate the procedure.
The upgraded CERN LHCb detector, due to start data taking in 2021, will have to reconstruct 4 TB/s of raw detector data in real time using commodity processors. This is one of the biggest real-time data processing challenges in any scientific domain. We present an intrinsically parallel reconstruction algorithm for the vertex detector of the LHCb experiment designed to optimally exploit multi-core general purpose architectures. We compare it to previous state-of-the-art scalar pattern recognition algorithms and show significantly faster processing and in some cases increased physics performanc…
We present an improved hybrid algorithm for vertexing, that combines deep learning with conventional methods. Even though the algorithm is a generic approach to vertex finding, we focus here on it's application as an alternative Primary Vertex (PV) finding tool for the LHCb experiment. In the transition to Run 3 in 2021, LHCb will undergo a major luminosity upgrade, going from 1.1 to 5.6 expected visible PVs per event, and it will adopt a purely software trigger. We use a custom kernel to transform the sparse 3D space of hits and tracks into a dense 1D dataset, and then apply Deep Learning tec…
In 2015, the LHCb experiment established a new and unique software trigger strategy with the purpose of increasing the purity of the signal events by applying the same algorithms online and offline. To achieve this, real-time calibration and alignment of all LHCb sub-systems is needed to provide vertexing, tracking, and particle identification of the best possible quality. The calibration of the refractive index of the RICH radiators, the calibration of the Hybrid Photon Detector image, and the alignment of the RICH mirror system, are reported in this contribution. The stability of the RICH pe…
The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) detector is designed to detect decays of b- and c- hadrons for the study of CP violation and rare decays. At the end of the LHC Run 2, many of the LHCb measurements remained statistically dominated. In order to increase the trigger yield for purely hadronic channels, the hardware trigger will be removed, and the detector will be read out at 40 MHz. This, in combination with the five-fold increase in luminosity, requires radical changes to LHCb's electronics, and, in some cases, the replacement of entire sub-detectors with state-of-the-art detector techno…
The software alignment of planar tracking detectors using samples of charged particle trajectories may lead to global detector distortions that affect vertex and momentum resolution. We present an alignment procedure that constrains such distortions by making use of samples of decay vertices reconstructed from two or more trajectories and putting constraints on their invariant mass. We illustrate the method by using a sample of invariant-mass constrained vertices from D^0 --> K^- pi^+ decays to remove a curvature bias in the LHCb spectrometer.
A significant upgrade of the LHCb detector is scheduled to be installed in 2018-2019. Afterwards all sub-detectors will be read out at the LHC bunch crossing frequency of 40 MHz and the trigger will be fully implemented in software. The silicon strip vertex detector will be replaced by a hybrid pixel detector. In these proceedings the following items are discussed: frontend ASIC, data rates, data transmission, cooling, radiation hard sensors, module design and simulated performance.
A FPGA-based architecture for real-time cluster finding in the LHCb silicon pixel detector
INFN Sezione di Pisa（意大利国家核物理研究所比萨分部）；Scuola Normale Superiore（比萨高等师范学校）；Università di Pisa（比萨大学）；Università degli Studi di Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Liverpool University（利物浦大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Instituto Galego de Física de Altas Enerxías (IGFAE)（加利西亚高能物理研究所（IGFAE））；Universidade de Santiago de Compostela（圣地亚哥德孔波斯特拉大学）
The 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 about either the deposited charge or the timing information from tracks traversing the 14 x 14mm matrix of 55 x 55 um pixels. The rat…
Absolute luminosity measurements are of general interest for colliding-beam experiments at storage rings. These measurements are necessary to determine the absolute cross-sections of reaction processes and are valuable to quantify the performance of the accelerator. Using data taken in 2010, LHCb has applied two methods to determine the absolute scale of its luminosity measurements for proton-proton collisions at the LHC with a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. In addition to the classic "van der Meer scan" method a novel technique has been developed which makes use of direct imaging of the indi…
