Speaker
Description
To cope with an increase of luminosity at Run-3 of the LHC, a new trigger readout path has been installed to the Liquid Argon Calorimeters.
More than 1500 boards of the legacy system were refurbished and re-installed, 124 new on-detector boards equipped with large FPGAs were added to digitize the calorimeter trigger signals, and all the monitoring and control infrastructure is being adapted and commissioned.
This contribution will present the challenges of the installation, the commissioning and the milestones still to be completed towards the full operation of both the legacy and the new readout paths for the LHC Run-3.
Summary (500 words)
The Liquid Argon Calorimeters are employed by ATLAS for all electromagnetic calorimetry in the pseudo-rapidity region |η| < 3.2, and for hadronic and forward calorimetry in the region from |η| = 1.5 to |η| = 4.9. They also provide inputs to the first level of the ATLAS trigger. After successful period of data taking during the LHC Run-2 between 2015 and 2018 the ATLAS detector entered into the a long period of shutdown. In 2022 the LHC will restart and the Run-3 period should see an increase of luminosity and pile-up up to 80 interaction per bunch crossing.
To cope with this harsher conditions, a new trigger readout path has been installed during the long shutdown. This new path should improve significantly the triggering performances on electromagnetic objects. This will be achieved by increasing the granularity of the objects available at trigger level by up to a factor of ten.
The installation of this new trigger readout chain required also the update of the legacy system. More than 1500 boards of the precision readout have been extracted from the ATLAS pit, refurbished and re-installed. The legacy analog trigger readout that will remain during the LHC Run-3 as a backup of the new digital trigger system has also been updated.
For the new system 124 new on-detector boards have been added. Those boards that are operating in a radiative environment are digitizing the calorimeter trigger signals at 40MHz. The digital signal is sent to the off-detector system and processed online to provide the measured energy value for each unit of readout. In total up to 31Tbps are analyzed by the processing system and more than 62Tbps are generated for downstream reconstruction. To minimize the triggering latency the processing system had to be installed underground. The limited available space imposed a very compact hardware structure. To achieve a compact system, large FPGAs with high throughput have been mounted on ATCA mezzanines cards. In total no more than 3 ATCA shelves are used to process the signal from approximately 34000 channels.
Given that modern technologies have been used compared to the previous system, all the monitoring and control infrastructure is being adapted and commissioned as well.
This contribution will present the challenges of the installation, the commissioning and the milestones still to be completed towards the full operation of both the legacy and the new readout paths for the LHC Run-3.
