The Gaudi architecture and framework are designed to provide a common infrastructure and environment for simulation, filtering, reconstruction and analysis applications. In this context, a Detector Description Service was developed in LHCb in order to also provide easy and coherent access to the description of the experimental apparatus. This service centralizes every information about the detector, including geometry, materials, alignment, calibration, structure and controls. From the proof of concept given by the first functional implementation of this service late 2000, the Detector Description Service has grown and has become one of the major components of the LHCb software, shared among all applications, including simulation, reconstruction, analysis and visualization.
We describe here the full and functional implementation of the service. We stress the easiness of customization and extension of the detector description by the user, on the seamless integration with condition databases in order to handle time dependent data and on the choice of XML as a persistency back-end for LHCb Detector data. We show how the detector description can be shared but still contains application specific data and keeps at the same time several levels of granularity. We present several external tools which provide additional value to the Detector Description Service like a dedicated, easy to use XML editor and different geometry checkers. We finally give hints on how this service could evolve to be part of a common effort between all LHC experiments that would aim at defining common Detector description tools at the level of the LCG project.
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…
Starting from 2018, the LHCb detector will be upgraded to operate at higher luminosity and extend its potential for new discoveries. The Ring Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) detectors are one of the key components for particle identification of the LHCb detector and the upgraded specifications will require a redesign of the optoelectronic readout chain. In the present work, we describe the experimental setup and the results of the tests carried out with a particle beam to assess and validate the performance of the optoelectronic readout system.
The calorimeter and muon systems are essential components to provide a trigger for the LHCb experiment. The calorimeter system comprises a scintillating pad detector and pre-shower, followed by electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters. The calorimeter system allows photons, electrons and hadrons to be identified, and their energy to be measured. The muon system consists of five measuring stations equipped with Multi-Wire Proportional Chambers (MWPCs) and triple-Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) detectors, separated by iron filters. It allows the muons identification and transverse momentum measur…
The Ring Imaging Cherenkov detectors of the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are equipped with Hybrid Photo-Detectors. These vacuum photo-detectors are affected by the stray magnetic field of the LHCb magnet, which degrades their imaging properties. This effect increases the error on the Cherenkov angle measurement and would reduce the particle identification capabilities of LHCb. A system has been developed for the RICH2 Ring Imaging Cherenkov detector to perform a detailed characterisation of the magnetic distortion effects. It is described, along with the methods impleme…
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…
The LHCb RICH system provides hadron identification over a wide momentum range (2-100 GeV/c). This detector system is key to LHCb's precision flavour physics programme, which has unique sensitivity to physics beyond the standard model. This paper reports on the performance of the LHCb RICH in Run II, following significant changes in the detector and operating conditions. The changes include the refurbishment of significant number of photon detectors, assembled using new vacuum technologies, and the removal of the aerogel radiator. The start of Run II of the LHC saw the beam energy increase to …
The LHCb RICH1 detector uses hybrid photon detectors (HPDs) as its optical sensors. A calibration system has been constructed to provide corrections for distortions that are primarily due to external magnetic fields. We describe here the system design, construction, operation and performance.
In 2019, the LHCb experiment at CERN will undergo a major upgrade where its detector electronics and the entire readout system will be replaced. The goal is to read-out all events at the full LHC frequency of 40 MHz, reaching a total data rate of ~40 Tb/s. In this context, a new timing, trigger and readout control system has been developed: its main tasks are to distribute centrally the clock, the timing information and to synchronize all elements in the readout system: from the very last Front-End ASIC to the building of events to be stored. The heart of the timing and readout control system …
The LHCb experiment is one of the four large detectors operating at the LHC at CERN and it is mainly devoted to CP violation measurements and to the search for new physics in rare decays of beauty and charm hadrons. The data from the two Ring Image Cherenkov (RICH-1 and RICH-2) detectors are essential to identify particles in a wide momentum range. From 2019 onwards 14 TeV collisions with luminosities reaching up to $2\cdot10^{33}$ cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ with 25 ns bunch spacing are planned, with the goal of collecting 5 fb$^{-1}$ of data per year. In order to avoid degradation of the PID performa…
The limitations in performance of the present RICH system in the LHCb experiment are given by the natural chromatic dispersion of the gaseous Cherenkov radiator, the aberrations of the optical system and the pixel size of the photon detectors. Moreover, the overall PID performance can be affected by high detector occupancy as the pattern recognition becomes more difficult with high particle multiplicities. This paper shows a way to improve performance by systematically addressing each of the previously mentioned limitations. These ideas are applied in the present and future upgrade phases of t…
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…
LHCb is an experiment dedicated to study CP violation and other rare phenomena in B mesons decays with very high precision. It is one of the four experiments that will operate at the 14Tev proton-proton Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in 2008. Here we briefly describe the current status of the experiment, as well as plans towards a future upgrade.
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 $+45^\…
A new method has been developed to check the correct behaviour of the frontend electronics of the LHCb muon detector. This method is based on the measurement of the electronic noise rate at different thresholds of the frontend discriminator. The method was used to choose the optimal discriminator thresholds. A procedure based on this method was implemented in the detector control system and allowed the detection of a small percentage of frontend channels which had deteriorated. A Monte Carlo simulation has been performed to check the validity of the method.
The HeRSCheL detector consists of a set of scintillating counters, designed to increase the coverage of the LHCb experiment in the high-rapidity regions on either side of the main spectrometer. The new detector improves the capabilities of LHCb for studies of diffractive interactions, most notably Central Exclusive Production. In this paper the construction, installation, commissioning, and performance of HeRSCheL are presented.
LHCb has been installed by spring 2008, followed by intensive testing and commissioning of the system in order to be ready for first data taking. Despite the horizontal geometry of the LHCb detector it was possible to collect over one million useful cosmic events that allowed a first time alignment of the sub-detectors. Moreover events from beam dumps during the LHC synchronisation tests provided very useful data for further time and spacial alignment of the detector. Here we present an overview of our commissioning activities, the current status and an outlook on the startup in 2009.
The MUON Detector (MD) of LHCb is one of the largest instruments of this kind worldwide, and one of the most irradiated. It has performed exceptionally well during the RUN1 and RUN2 of the LHC at an instantaneous luminosity of 4$\times$10$^{32}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$, with tracking inefficiencies at the level of 1$\%$ and 2.6$\%$, respectively. Looking forward for the future LHCb Upgrade 2 (U2) planned in 2031 and aiming in running the detector at increased luminosity by a factor $\sim$50, and at the same time keeping a very high ($\sim$99$\%$) detection efficiency, an option with reuse significan…
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 LHCb Experiment is preparing a detector upgrade fully exploit the flavour physics potential of the LHC. The whole detector will be read out at the full collision rate and the online event selection will be performed by a software trigger. This will increase the event yields by a facto 10 for muonic and a factor 20 for hadronic final states. Research towards the upgrade has started with the target to install the detector in 2018.
The LHCb Outer Tracker is a straw drift detector with a modular design and a total of 53760 readout channels distributed over a sensitive area of 12 double layers of 6x5 m2 each. The main electronics readout requirement is the precise (0.5 ns) drift time measurement at an occupancy of 4% and 1 MHz readout. A total of 128 channels are read out by one Front-End box. About half of the FE-Boxes have been built. Quality Assurance during the production has been performed on single FE-Box components. The assembled FE-Box is finally commissioned using a special FE-Tester. The FE-Tester is a programmab…
The calorimeter system of LHCb is subdivided into four sub-detectors which ensure its longitudinal segmentation: a Scintillator Pad Detector (SPD) followed by a Preshower (PS) and then an electromagnetic (ECAL) an hadronic (HCAL) calorimeter. After a description of these detectors, procedures developed to calibrate their response are discussed together with the degradation of response observed due to the harsh conditions (hard radiation and high current). First results on the calorimeter performance over the two most productive years of physics data taking, 2011 and 2012 are given.
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 upgraded LHCb detector, due to start datataking in 2022, will have to process an average data rate of 4~TB/s in real time. Because LHCb's physics objectives require that the full detector information for every LHC bunch crossing is read out and made available for real-time processing, this bandwidth challenge is equivalent to that of the ATLAS and CMS HL-LHC software read-out, but deliverable five years earlier. Over the past six years, the LHCb collaboration has undertaken a bottom-up rewrite of its software infrastructure, pattern recognition, and selection algorithms to make them better…
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…
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 method…
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 …
The LHCb detector will be upgraded during the Long Shutdown 2 (LS2) of the LHC in order to cope with higher instantaneous luminosities and to read out the data at 40 MHz using a trigger-less readout system. The current LHCb main tracking system will be replaced by a single homogeneous detector based on scintillating fibres. This contribution gives an overview of the scintillating fibre tracker concept and presents the experience from the series production complemented by most recent test-beam and laboratory results.
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 …
The LHCb experiment is designed to perform high-precision measurements of CP violation and search for New Physics using the enormous flux involving beauty and charm quarks produced at the LHC. The operation and the results obtained from the data collected in 2010 and 2011 demonstrate that the detector is robust and functioning very well. However, the limit of 1 fb^-1 of data per nominal year cannot be overcome without improving the detector. We therefore plan for an upgraded spectrometer by 2018 with a 40 MHz readout and a much more flexible software-based triggering system that will increase …
The LHCb detector optimised its performance in Runs~1 and~2 by stabilising the instantaneous luminosity during a fill. This was achieved by tuning the distance between the two colliding beams according to the measurement of instantaneous luminosity from hardware-based trigger counters. The upgraded LHCb detector operates at fivefold instantaneous luminosity compared to the previous runs, and it has a fully software-based trigger. Consequently, a new approach to the luminosity measurement is adopted. New counters, with particular attention to maximum stability in time, and a new dedicated detec…
The LHCb experiment(Fig. 1), that is presently taking data at CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), aims at the study of CP violation in the B meson sector. Its key elements is the Muon detector [1], which allows triggering, and muon identification from inclusive b decays. The electronic system (Fig. 2) of the whole detector is very complex and its Muon detector Experiment Control System (ECS) allows monitoring and control of a number of Front-End boards in excess of 7000. The present system in charge of controlling Muon detector Front-End (FE) Electronics co…
The status of the LHCb experiment is presented. The experiment has been taking data since the LHC startup. The performances of the various sub-detectors are discussed and a preliminary measurement of the b cross-section is reported. The value is in agreement with expectations.
A method is described which allows to deduce the dead-time of the front-end electronics of the LHCb muon detector from a series of measurements performed at different luminosities at a bunch-crossing rate of 20 MHz. The measured values of the dead-time range from 70 ns to 100 ns. These results allow to estimate the performance of the muon detector at the future bunch-crossing rate of 40 MHz and at higher luminosity.
The LHCb detector will be upgraded to make more efficient use of the available luminosity at the LHC in Run III and extend its potential for discovery. The Ring Imaging Cherenkov detectors are key components of the LHCb detector for particle identification. In this paper we describe the setup and the results of tests in a charged particle beam, carried out to assess prototypes of the upgraded opto-electronic chain from the Multi-Anode PMT photosensor to the readout and data acquisition system.
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 Inner Tracker of the LHCb experiment is a silicon microstrip detector consisting of 336 detector modules with either one or two sensors. The module production is now underway and we present here the setup employed for module testing during the production. The setup is based on the same electronics that will be used in the final experiment. We perform burn-in and ageing tests with the help of a custom made Temperature Cycling Box controlled with LabVIEW under Windows. The DAQ is done in another PC running Linux. Here we integrate the different C/C++ libraries used to communicate to the LHCb…
LHCb is a general purpose forward detector located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Although initially optimized for the study of hadrons containing beauty quarks, the better than expected performance of the detector hardware and trigger system allowed LHCb to perform precise measurements of particle properties across a wide range of light hadron species produced at the LHC. The abundance of these light hadron species, and the large branching ratios of many theoretically interesting decay modes, have made it mandatory for LHCb to perform a large part of its data analysis within the …
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 …
Finding tracks downstream of the magnet at the earliest LHCb trigger level is not part of the baseline plan of the upgrade trigger, on account of the significant CPU time required to execute the search. Many long-lived particles, such as $K^0_S$ and strange baryons, decay after the vertex track detector, so that their reconstruction efficiency is limited. We present a study of the performance of a future innovative real-time tracking system based on FPGAs, developed within a R\&D effort in the context of the LHCb Upgrade Ib (LHC Run~4), dedicated to the reconstruction of the particles downstre…
The LHCb experiment at CERN is currently completing its first big data taking campaign at the LHC started in 2009. It has been collecting data at more than 2.5 times its nominal design luminosity value and with a global efficiency of ~92%. Even more striking, the efficiency between online and offline recorded luminosity, obtained by comparing the data quality output, is close to 99%, which highlights how well the detector, its data acquisition system and its control system have been performing despite much harsher and more variable conditions than initially foreseen. In this paper, the excelle…
We describe the LHCb detector simulation application (Gauss) based on the Geant4 toolkit. The application is built using the Gaudi software framework, which is used for all event-processing applications in the LHCb experiment. The existence of an underlying framework allows several common basic services such as persistency, interactivity, as well as detector geometry description or particle data to be shared between simulation, reconstruction and analysis applications. The main benefits of such common services are coherence between different event-processing stages as well as reduced developme…
The performance of the ring-imaging Cherenkov detectors at the LHCb experiment is determined during the LHC Run 2 period between 2015 and 2018. The stability of the Cherenkov angle resolution and number of detected photons with time and running conditions is measured. The particle identification performance is evaluated with data and found to satisfy the requirements of the physics programme.
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 LHCb Outer Tracker is a gaseous detector covering an area of 5x6 m2 with 12 double layers of straw tubes. The detector with its services are described together with the commissioning and calibration procedures. Based on data of the first LHC running period from 2010 to 2012, the performance of the readout electronics and the single hit resolution and efficiency are presented. The efficiency to detect a hit in the central half of the straw is estimated to be 99.2%, and the position resolution is determined to be approximately 200 um. The Outer Tracker received a dose in the hottest region c…
National Research University Higher School of Economics（国立研究型大学高等经济学院）
LHCb is one of the major experiments operating at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The richness of the physics program and the increasing precision of the measurements in LHCb lead to the need of ever larger simulated samples. This need will increase further when the upgraded LHCb detector will start collecting data in the LHC Run 3. Given the computing resources pledged for the production of Monte Carlo simulated events in the next years, the use of fast simulation techniques will be mandatory to cope with the expected dataset size. In LHCb generative models, which are nowadays widely used …
Most of the computing resources pledged to the LHCb experiment at CERN are necessary to the production of simulated samples used to predict resolution functions on the reconstructed quantities and the reconstruction and selection efficiency. Projecting the Simulation requests to the years following the upcoming LHCb Upgrade, the relative computing resources would exceed the pledges by more than a factor of 2. In this contribution, I discuss how Machine Learning can help to speed up the Detector Simulation for the upcoming Runs of the LHCb experiment.
The LHCb Outer Tracker is a gaseous detector covering an area of $5\times 6 m^2$ with 12 double layers of straw tubes. The performance of the detector is presented based on data of the LHC Run 2 running period from 2015 and 2016. Occupancies and operational experience for data collected in $p p$, pPb and PbPb collisions are described. An updated study of the ageing effects is presented showing no signs of gain deterioration or other radiation damage effects. In addition several improvements with respect to LHC Run 1 data taking are introduced. A novel real-time calibration of the time-alignmen…
We describe the Hybrid seeding, a standalone pattern recognition algorithm aiming at finding charged particle trajectories for the LHCb upgrade. A significant improvement to the charged particle reconstruction efficiency is accomplished by exploiting the knowledge of the LHCb magnetic field and the position of energy deposits in the scintillating fibre tracker detector. Moreover, we achieve a low fake rate and a small contribution to the overall timing budget of the LHCb real-time data processing.
The LHCb experiment is preparing for a major upgrade in 2018-2019. One of the key components in the upgrade is a new silicon tracker situated upstream of the analysis magnet of the experiment. The Upstream Tracker (UT) will consist of four planes of silicon strip detectors, with each plane covering an area of about 2 m$^2$. An important consideration of these detectors is their performance after they have been exposed to a large radiation dose. In this article we present test beam results of pre-prototype n-in-p and p-in-n sensors that have been irradiated with fluences up to $4.0\times10^{14}…
The RICH detectors of the LHCb experiment provide identification of hadrons produced in high energy proton-proton collisions in the LHC at CERN over a wide momentum range (2 to 100 GeV/c). Cherenkov light is collected on photon detector planes sensitive to single photons. The RICH will be upgraded (in 2019) to read out every bunch crossing, at a rate of 40 MHz. The current hybrid photon detectors (HPD) will be replaced with multi-anode photomultiplier tubes (customisations of the Hamamatsu R11265 and the H12699 MaPMTs). These 8$\times$8 pixel devices meet the experimental requirements thanks t…
The LHCb ultra-fast simulation option, Lamarr: design and validation
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN)（意大利国家核物理研究所）；University of Firenze（佛罗伦萨大学）；University of Milano-Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学）；European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)（欧洲核子研究组织）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；University of Ferrara（费拉拉大学）
