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Exploring the Terascale at LHC with Novel Highly Granular Calorimeters

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - Novel Calorimetry (Exploring the Terascale at LHC with Novel Highly Granular Calorimeters)

Reporting period: 2020-04-01 to 2022-03-31

The "Novel Calorimetry" proposal deals with a novel, yet untested, high-risk approach to calorimetry that combines state of the art techniques so far only used independently either in charged particle tracking or conventional calorimeters. New technologies will have to be developed for such a ground-breaking calorimeter. These include powerful, radiation hard electronics in emerging technologies using feature sizes of 130 nm or 65 nm; low-cost silicon sensors in the emerging technology using 8” silicon wafers, also in Europe; environmentally-friendly cooling technologies using liquid C02; high performance and fast decision making logic using new more powerful FPGA’s, all to be produced at an industrial scale.

This project has formed a part of the upgrade of the CMS experiment for the high luminosity phase of the Large Hadron Collider. This is curiosity driven science that enriches human knowledge and understanding of Nature. Technological spinoffs into other fields of science and society are expected.

The overall objective is to measure the energy, the direction, the identity and the time of arrival of particles produced in high energy proton-proton collisions that mimic a subset of collisions that would have been occurring in our universe a fraction of nanosecond after the Big Bang. This enables us to study the composition of our early universe, the forces of Nature relevant at that time, and its subsequent evolution.


The three key, and interconnected, areas in this project are

1. Validation of the physics performance and detector optimisation
2. Development, implementation and delivery of prototype front-end electronics
3. Development, implementation and delivery of a trigger (selection of events of interest) & data acquisition (DAQ) prototype


These main objectives have been fully met. The design of the calorimeter has been validated by the results from the tests of a full-scale calorimeter prototype in CERN beams in 2018. Five papers have been published/submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Instrumentation, JINST. The full-scale realization/construction for the upgrade of the endcap calorimetry of CMS experiment at the LHC is now underway.
The concept proposed in "Novel Calorimetry" AdV Grant formed the core of the technical design report (TDR) to build an endcap calorimeter for the upgrade of the CMS experiment at CERN. The TDR was submitted to CERN's peer review committee (the LHCC) in April 2018 and approved. Many of the results from teh work done in teh context of "Novel Calorimetery" were included. The TDR reference is CERN-LHCC-2017-023 (9 April 2018) [https://cds.cern.ch/record/2293646?ln=en]

• Validation of the physics performance and detector optimisation.
Evaluation in 2018 of a large-scale full-slice calorimeter prototype in electron and hadron test beams at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland). The results from these tests have now been published in the peer-reviewed Journal for Instrumentation (JINST) or are being prepared for publication. The titles of the papers indicate the different aspects of the technical progress that has been made.
1. Test Beam Study of SiPM-on-Tile Configurations
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-0221/16/07/P07022
2. The DAQ System of the 12,000 Channel CMS High Granularity Calorimeter Prototype
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-0221/16/04/T04001
3. Construction and commissioning of CMS CE prototype silicon modules
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-0221/16/04/T04002
4. Charge Collection and Electrical Characterization of Neutron Irradiated Silicon Pad Detectors for the CMS High Granularity Calorimeter
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-0221/15/09/P09031
5. Response of a CMS HGCAL silicon-pad electromagnetic calorimeter prototype to 20-300 GeV positrons
https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06855 Accepted for publication by JINST:
6.Performance of CMS High Granularity Calorimeter prototype to charged pion beams of 20-300 GeV/c. Submitted to JINST
https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.04740

• Development, implementation and delivery of a trigger & data acquisition (DAQ) prototype. A complete HGCAL-flavour Serenity board, with full I/O capability installed. Extensive tests of the prototypes have been carried out, yielding encouraging results. Full integration is underway of these boards into the high-granularity calorimeter (HGCAL) upgrade project of the CMS experiment.

• Trigger simulation
The studies have led to the establishment of a baseline design for the CMS experiment with the validation of its anticipated performance. The design has been demonstrated to be implementable within the Serenity boards.

• Development, implementation and delivery of prototype front-end electronics
The third prototype of the front-end electronics ASIC, HGCROC3, was received in 2021 and has been evaluated. The performance has been found satisfactory, though some modifications are necessary before the launch of an engineering run which should give chips for installation in the experiment. Two chips were irradiated with encouraging results in the cold.

• Delivery of full-size pre-series Si sensors from 8” wafers by Hamamatsu (Japan)
HPK has delivered full-size 8” sensors that now meet the specifications laid down by the CMS experiment. A pre-series batch was ordered from HPK late in 2021. Delivery of the first pre-series sensors is imminent. They will be tested and irradiated before the launch of pre-production (expected by the end of 2022) of sensors destined for the installation in the experiment.

All the four items above have been developed, prototyped and adequately validated for use in the CMS experiment. We consider these developments to have fulfilled the programme laid down in the “Novel Calorimetry” Project 670406.
• Full-size 8” silicon sensors have been developed and validated. A set of pre-series sensors has been ordered from HPK (Japan).
• HGCROC3 has been produced and will be mounted, and tested, on close-to-final prototype silicon modules.
• High power, high bandwidth, high speed boards (Serenity) have been manufactured and validated. The family of FPGAs for use in the experiment has been selected. These FPGAs will be able to handle the high volume of very fine-grained information from the HGCAL for event selection and analysis. The firmware continues to be developed to optimize the performance further.
• Data from the campaign of testing using test beams has allowed validation of techniques for the use of fine-grained information in measurement of energy of electrons and hadrons in test beams.
A silicon module comprising a 6" hexagonal silicon sensor mounted on a Copper/tungsten base plate wc