Speaker
Markus Friedl
(HEPHY Vienna)
Description
The Belle experiment at KEK (Tsukuba, Japan) studies CP
violation in B meson decays by measuring the sides and
angles of the unitarity triangle. Some of these measurements
require the reconstruction of the vertices of the two
decaying B mesons in an Y(4S) event, making the Silicon
Vertex Detector (SVD) a critical device for the experiment.
The initial SVD1 was in operation from 1999 until 2003,
suffering from radiation levels beyond expectation. The
current SVD2, installed in 2003, introduced several
improvements, like radiation tolerance and a higher accuracy
due to an additional fourth layer. Over the years, the
occupancy levels grew along with luminosity especially in
the innermost layer ( 10%), compromising tracking precision
and data acquisition throughput. This leads to another
upgrade called SVD2.5, where the two inner layers will be
equipped with faster and dead-time-free front-end amplifiers.
The Electronics-2 group at HEPHY Vienna designed and built
the SVD2 FADC VME modules which digitize the analog data
from the front-end, extract the first-level trigger using
combinatorics between layers and present binary hit data to
the L1.5 trigger electronics. Due to our experience from
CMS, we suggested the APV25 front-end chip for the SVD2.5
upgrade and built several prototype systems including
various front-end modules, repeaters, VME controllers and
FADCs with hardware data processors performing pedestal
subtraction, common mode correction and zero suppression
within FPGAs. Moreover, multiple samples along the shaping
curve of the APV25 can be used to reconstruct the particle
timing with a precision of a few nanoseconds, which will
also be implemented in FPGA firmware using look-up tables,
in order to reject off-time hits and thus eliminate the
occupancy problem. Finally, we try to optimize the
signal-to-noise ratio of the front-end detector module,
using SVD2.5 sensors and the APV25 front-end chip.
Primary author
Markus Friedl
(HEPHY Vienna)
