Speaker
Description
The Zero Degree Calorimeters of the ALICE experiment were designed with the twofold purpose of both estimating the centrality in heavy ion collisions by measuring the energy carried away by the spectator nucleons and of measuring the luminosity delivered to the experiment exploiting the high cross sections for neutron emission from electromagnetic dissociation process. The measurement of centrality has been succesfully extended to p-A collisions with the detection of nucleons ejected from the nucleus by the collisions with the projectile proton ("gray" nucleons) and those resulting from de-excitation processes ("black" nucleons). The applications of the detector in triggering and analysis have been expanded during the years of operation in RUN1 and RUN2. These now include both the reaction plane and the longitudinal asymmetry measurements in heavy ion collisions. Moreover the ZDC is used to reject the parasitic interactions of main bunches with satellite bunches in A-A and p-A and to tag diffractive events in p p collisions.
The foreseen operation in RUN3 with the tenfold increase in the luminosity delivered by LHC in heavy ion collisions, together with the continuous acquisition strategy that is being adopted by ALICE, will be challenging for the ZDC readout system. The readout upgrade will be based on FMC digitizers with trigger, timing and charge integration functionality performed through FPGA.
The performance of the ZDC with respect to the different measurements and the upgrade strategy will be presented.
Secondary topics
Front-end readout and trigger, experience with current calorimeters at the energy frontier
| Applications | Design concepts for future calorimeter at the intensity frontier |
|---|---|
| Primary topic | Cherenkov |
