Physics

We present two prototypes of a gigabit transceiver ASIC, GBCR1 and GBCR2, both designed in a 65-nm CMOS technology for the ATLAS Inner Tracker Pixel Detector readout upgrade. The first prototype, GBCR1, has four upstream receiver channels and one downstream transmitter channel with pre-emphasis. Each upstream channel receives the data at 5.12 Gbps through a 5 meter AWG34 Twinax cable from an ASIC driver located on the pixel module and restores the signal from the high frequency loss due to the low mass cable. The signal is retimed by a recovered clock before it is sent to the optical transmitter VTRx+. The downstream driver is designed to transmit the 2.56 Gbps signal from lpGBT to the electronics on the pixel module over the same cable. The peak-peak jitter (throughout the paper jitter is always peak-peak unless specified) of the restored signal is 35.4 ps at the output of GBCR1, and 138 ps for the downstream channel at the cable ends. GBCR1 consumes 318 mW and is tested. The second prototype, GBCR2, has seven upstream channels and two downstream channels. Each upstream channel works at 1.28 Gbps to recover the data directly from the RD53B ASIC through a 1 meter custom FLEX cable followed by a 6 meter AWG34 Twinax cable. The equalized signal of each upstream channel is retimed by an input 1.28 GHz phase programmable clock. Compared with the signal at the FLEX input, the additional jitter of the equalized signal is about 80 ps when the retiming logic is o . When the retiming logic is on, the jitter is 50 ps at GBCR2 output, assuming the 1.28 GHz retiming clock is from lpGBT. The downstream is designed to transmit the 160 Mbps signal from lpGBT through the same cable connection to RD53B and the jitter is about 157 ps at the cable ends. GBCR2 consumes about 150 mW when the retiming logic is on. This design was submitted in November 2019.

Sensors fabricated from high resistivity, float zone, silicon material have been the basis of vertex detectors and trackers for the last 30 years. The areas of these devices have increased from a few square cm to 200 m 2 for the existing CMS tracker. High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), CMS and ATLAS tracker upgrades will each require more than 200 m 2 of silicon and the CMS High Granularity Calorimeter (HGCAL) will require more than 600 m 2 . The cost and complexity of assembly of these devices is related to the area of each module, which in turn is set by the size of the silicon sensors. In addition to large area, the devices must be radiation hard, which requires the use of sensors thinned to 200 microns or less. The combination of wafer thinning and large wafer diameter is a significant technical challenge, and is the subject of this work. We describe work on development of thin sensors on 200mm wafers using wafer bonding technology. Results of development runs with float zone, Silicon-on-Insulator and Silicon-Silicon bonded wafer technologies are reported.

Naturally occurring radionuclide 210 Pb ( T 1/2 =22.2 y) is an important source of background in rare event searches, such as neutrinoless double- β decay and dark matter direct detection experiments. When a sample mass of hundreds of grams is available, γ -counting measurements can be performed. However, there are other cases where only grams of sample can be used. For these cases, better sensitivities are required. In this paper, in collaboration with the Astroparticle Physics group at Carleton University, the capabilities of the A.E. Lalonde AMS Laboratory at the University of Ottawa for 210 Pb measurements are discussed. PbF 2 and PbO targets were used, selecting in the low energy sector, respectively, (PbF 3 ) ??or (PbO 2 ) ??ions. For fluoride targets, the blank 210 Pb/ 206 Pb ratio was in the 10 ??4 to 10 ??3 range, but current output was lower and less stable. For oxide targets, current output showed better stability, despite a significant difference in current output for commercial PbO and processed samples, and background studies suggested a background not much higher than that of the fluoride targets. Both target materials showed, therefore, good performance for 210 Pb AMS assay. Measurements of Kapton films, an ultra-thin polymer material, where masses available are typically just several grams, were performed. 90% C.L. upper limits for the 210 Pb specific activity in the range of 0.85-2.5 Bq/kg were established for several Kapton HN films.

The selection of low-radioactive construction materials is of utmost importance for the success of low-energy rare event search experiments. Besides radioactive contaminants in the bulk, the emanation of radioactive radon atoms from material surfaces attains increasing relevance in the effort to further reduce the background of such experiments. In this work, we present the 222 Rn emanation measurements performed for the XENON1T dark matter experiment. Together with the bulk impurity screening campaign, the results enabled us to select the radio-purest construction materials, targeting a 222 Rn activity concentration of 10 μ Bq/kg in 3.2 t of xenon. The knowledge of the distribution of the 222 Rn sources allowed us to selectively eliminate critical components in the course of the experiment. The predictions from the emanation measurements were compared to data of the 222 Rn activity concentration in XENON1T. The final 222 Rn activity concentration of (4.5 ± 0.1) μ Bq/kg in the target of XENON1T is the lowest ever achieved in a xenon dark matter experiment.

We report on a novel detection system for collinear laser spectroscopy which provides an almost 4π solid angle for fluorescence photon detection by employing curved surface mirrors. Additional parabolic angular filters offer passive stray light suppression and can be configured to match the experimental conditions. The mirror surfaces have an excellent reflectivity over a broad band of wavelengths in the optical spectrum and can be substituted to expand the wavelength acceptance range even further. Experiments with this system were performed at two collinear laser spectroscopy setups, including the laser spectroscopic investigation of 36 Ca using rates of 25/s at NSCL, MSU.

The MEG-II experiment searches for the lepton flavor violating decay: mu in electron and gamma. The reconstruction of the positron trajectory uses a cylindrical drift chamber operated with a mixture of He and iC4H10 gas. It is important to provide a stable performance of the detector in terms of its electron transport parameters, avalanche multiplication, composition and purity of the gas mixture. In order to have a continuous monitoring of the quality of gas, we plan to install a small drift chamber, with a simple geometry that allows to measure very precisely the electron drift velocity in a prompt way. This monitoring chamber will be supplied with gas coming from the inlet and the outlet of the detector to determine if gas contaminations originate inside the main chamber or in the gas supply system. The chamber is a small box with cathode walls, that define a highly uniform electric field inside two adjacent drift cells. Along the axis separating the two drift cells, four staggered sense wires alternated with five guard wires collect the drifting electrons. The trigger is provided by two 90Sr weak calibration radioactive sources placed on top of a two thin scintillator tiles telescope. The whole system is designed to give a prompt response (within a minute) about drift velocity variations at the 0.001 level.

We present the design and test results of a 4-channel 10-Gbps/ch Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser array driver, the cpVLAD. With on-chip charge-pumps to extend the biasing headroom for the VCSELs needed for low temperature operation and mitigation of the radiation effects. The cpVLAD was fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS technology. The test results show that the cpVLAD is capable of driving VCSELs with forward bias voltages as high as 2.8 V from a 2.5 V power supply. The power consumption of the cpVLAD is 94 mW/ch.

We create a pair of symmetric Bitter-type electromagnet assemblies capable of producing multiple field configurations including uniform magnetic fields, spherical quadruple traps, or Ioffe-Pritchard magnetic bottles. Unlike other designs, our coil allows both radial and azimuthal cooling water flows by incorporating an innovative 3D-printed water distribution manifold. Combined with a double-coil geometry, such orthogonal flows permit stacking of non-concentric Bitter coils. We achieve a low thermal resistance of 4.2(1) K/kW and high water flow rate of 10.0(3) L/min at a pressure of 190(10) kPa.

Recovering the wavelength from disordered speckle patterns has become an exciting prospect as a wavelength measurement method due to its high resolution and simple design. In previous studies, panel cameras have been used to detect the subtle differences between speckle patterns. However, the volume, bandwidth, sensitivity, and cost (in non-visible bands) associated with panel cameras have hindered their utility in broader applications, especially in high speed and low-cost measurements. In this work, we broke the limitations imposed by panel cameras by using a quadrant detector (QD) to capture the speckle images. In the scheme of QD detection, speckle images are directly filtered by convolution, where the kernel is equal to one quarter of a speckle pattern. First, we proposed an up-sampling algorithm to pre-process the QD data. Then a new convolution neural network (CNN) based algorithm, shallow residual network (SRN), was proposed to train the up-sampled images. The experimental results show that a resolution of 4 fm (~ 0.5 MHz) was achieved at 1550nm with an updating speed of ~ 1 kHz. More importantly, the SRN shows excellent robustness. The wavelength can be precisely reconstructed from raw QD data without any averaging, even where there exists apparent noise. The low-cost, simple structure, high speed and robustness of this design promote the speckle-based wavemeter to the industrial grade. In addition, without the restriction of panel cameras, it is believed that this wavemeter opens new routes in many other fields, such as distributed optical fiber sensors, optical communications, and laser frequency stabilization.

Due to their simplicity and versatility of design, straight strip or rectangular pad anode structures are frequently employed with micro-pattern gas detectors to reconstruct high precision space points for various tracking applications. The particle impact point is typically determined by interpolating the charge collected by several neighboring pads. However, to effectively extract the inherent positional information, the lateral spacing of the straight pads must be significantly smaller than the extent of the charge cloud. In contrast, highly interleaved anode patterns, such as zigzags, can adequately sample the charge with a pitch comparable to the size of the charge cloud or even larger. This has the considerable advantage of providing the same performance while requiring far fewer instrumented channels. Additionally, the geometric parameters defining such zigzag structures may be tuned to provide a uniform detector response without the need for so-called pad response functions, while simultaneously maintaining excellent position resolution. We have measured the position resolution of a variety of zigzag shaped anode patterns optimized for various MPGDs, including GEM, Micromegas, and micro-RWELL and compared this performance to the same detectors equipped with straight pads of varying pitch. We report on the performance results of each readout structure, evaluated under identical conditions in a test beam.