T.C. Nicholls

The H1 lead/scintillating-fibre calorimeter

Abstract The backward region of the H1 detector has been upgraded in order to provide improved measurement of the scattered electron in deep inelastic scattering events. The centerpiece of the upgrade is a high-resolution lead/scintillating-fibre calorimeter. The main design goals of the calorimeter are: good coverage of the region close to the beam pipe, high angular resolution and energy resolution of better than 2% for 30 GeV electrons. The calorimeter should be capable of providing coarse hadronic energy measurement and precise time information to suppress out-of-time background events at the first trigger level. It must be compact due to space restrictions. These requirements were fulfilled by constructing two separate calorimeter sections. The inner electromagnetic section is made of 0.5 mm scintillating plastic fibres embedded in a lead matrix. Its lead-to-fibre ratio is 2.3:1 by volume. The outer hadronic section consists of 1.0 mm diameter fibres with a lead-to-fibre ratio of 3.4:1. The mechanical construction of the new calorimeter and its assembly in the H1 detector are described.

Performance of an electromagnetic lead/scintillating-fibre calorimeter for the H1 detector

Abstract The properties of final modules of a high resolution lead/scintillating-fibre calorimeter to upgrade the backward region of the H1 detector were studied with electrons in the energy range from 2–60 GeV. The electromagnetic calorimeter consists of scintillating fibres with a diameter of 0.5 mm embedded in a lead matrix. This small fibre radius, in combination with a lead-to-fibre ratio of 2.27:1, ensures excellent energy resolution which has been measured to be δ/E=7.1%/ E/GeV ⊕ 1.0% . The spatial resolution as a function of energy for impact points at the center of a cell is given by 4.4 mm/ E/GeV + 1.0 mm . The time resolution was found to be better than 0.4 ns.

The H1 SPACAL time-to-digital converter system

This paper describes a pipelined 1400-channel Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) system for the H1 Scintillating Fibre Calorimeter, which will soon be installed in the H1 experiment at DESY. The main task of the TDC system is to determine the time of arrival of energy depositions, and send this information from bunch crossings that satisfy the event trigger into the H1 data acquisition system. In addition, the TDC system must monitor the timing trigger, which vetoes bunch crossings that contain too much background energy. Products of the interaction are separated from background on the basis of their different times of arrival with respect to the bunch crossing clock. For this monitoring the TDC system uses automatic on-board histogramming hardware that produces a family of histograms for each of 1400 channels. The TDC function is performed by the TMC1004 ASIC. The system digitises over a range of 32 ns per bunch crossing with 1ns bins and a precision of 1ns. Because of the way the TMC1004 is designed, it is possible to vary the size of the bins between 0.6 ns and 3 ns by trading off measurement range for bin size. The system occupies two 9U VME crates.<<ETX>>