Particle Physics Seminar Series - Autumn Semester (1/11)

by Prof. Sebastian White (CERN)

Monday 12 Sept 2022, 11:00 → 12:00 US/Eastern

Seminar Room, Physics Department (Stony Brook)

FAST TIMING IN HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS

Abstract

Charged particle timing sensors and associated electronics have long provided particle identification through Time of Flight (with typically 50 - 100 PICOSEC rms resolution).
In spite of the development of Micropattern detectors and associated electronics starting in the 1980’s the higher speeds that they enabled were not immediately exploited for timing.
Instead  the community accessed picoseconds with precision tracking ( eg for B physics  or Cronin et al’s pi0 lifetime).

In the 1990's the LHC community turned to designing experiments capable of a ~2 order of magnitude increase in interaction rates over the SppS and Tevatron colliders.  This enabled covering the full allowed Higgs Mass range since the energy Frontier at hadron colliders is extended by increased luminosity. The current upgrades for HL-LHC have generated renewed interest in timing to address backgrounds associated with these high rates.

In this talk I will review aspects of the timing detector developments at CERN motivated by the HL-LHC challenge with an emphasis on signal processing.

 

 

Sebastian White, Ph D- short Bio

After early years in Rome Italy, Sebastian White grew up in the Stony Brook area.
He graduated from Harvard College and went on to a PhD (with Leon Lederman) at Columbia. Starting with his thesis experiment at the ISR, he has done experiments at all 5 Hadron Colliders (currently on CMS at the LHC).

For most of his career he has been affiliated with The Rockefeller University (initially Experimental High Energy Physics and then The Center for Studies in Physics and Biology). In 2011 he relocated to CERN and has focused on R&D for fast timing- initially with Kirk McDonald (Princeton) and the CERN SiDet group,  Then, in 2015, he and Giomataris proposed the PICOSEC Collaboration- now roughly 40 researchers from a dozen countries, which SUNY recently joined. He is also active in outreach activities relating to Nikola Tesla and history of Collider Physics- eg as Executive producer of “CERN-Why We Do What We Do” (2015) and as opinion writer (on Science) for Foxnews.com .