Development of scalable electronics for the TORCH time-of-flight detector

Journal article

The TORCH detector is proposed for the low-momentum particle identification upgrade of the LHCb experiment. It combines Time-Of-Flight and Cherenkov techniques to achieve charged particle separation up to 10 GeV/c. This requires a time resolution of 70 ps for single photons. Existing electronics has already demonstrated a 26 ps intrinsic time resolution; however the channel count and density need improvements for future micro-channel plate devices. This paper will report on a scalable design using custom ASICs (NINO-32 and HPTDC). The system provides up to 8 × 64 channels for a single micro-channel plate device. It is also designed to read out micro-channel plate tubes with charge-sharing technique.

Authors: Gao, R; Brook, N; Garcia, L; Cowie, E; Cussans, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: IOP Publishing
• Journal: Journal of Instrumentation
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 2
• Article number: C02028
• Publication date: 2015-01-01
• DOI: 10.1088/1748-0221/10/02/C02028
• EISSN: 1748-0221
• ISSN: 1748-0221
• Keywords: Cherenkov detectors; Photon detectors for UV, visible and IR photons (vacuum); Particle identification methods; Instrumentation and methods for time-of-flight (TOF) spectroscopy