Speaker
Description
The LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for the reconstruction of hadrons containing $b$ and $c$ quarks produced in proton-proton interactions. Run III of the LHC, which has started earlier this year, will see an increase in collision rates at LHCb by a factor of about five compared to previous runs in the last decade, necessitating a complete redesign of the experiment including a full detector readout at $30\ \text{MHz}$.
The Vertex Locator (VELO) is the closest sub-detector to the proton beam and surrounds the proton-proton collision region in order to track charged particles produced in the interaction and reconstruct production and decay vertices. It has been upgraded to a silicon pixel detector with many innovative components. The number of modules has been increased to 52 instead of 42 with its distance from the beam in the closed position at $5.1 \text{mm}$, around $3 \text{mm}$ closer than its predecessor. Each module contains 4 sensors, each bump-bonded to 3 VeloPix ASICs capable of reading out at the required rate. The ASICs are cooled by evaporative CO$_2$ through microchannels in thin plates of silicon substrate directly underneath the chips to maintain a temperature of $-20^\circ\text{C}$. The VELO is currently undergoing commissioning, vital for calibrating and understanding this new detector.
| Category | Particle / Astroparticle / Cosmology (Experiment) |
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