Thesis

Radiation Damage of the TileCal Optics components at the High Luminosity LHC phase

• Call:

  PT-CERN Call 2020/2

• Academic Year:

  2020/2021

• Domain:

  Astrophysics

• Supervisor:

  Rute Pedro

• Co-Supervisor:

  Patricia Conde Muino

• Institution:

  Instituto Superior Técnico (Universidade de Lisboa)

• Host Institution:

  Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas

• Abstract:

  The ATLAS Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is an essential instrument to measure jets, hadronic tau decays and the missing energy, participating in the trigger and providing decisive information for electron/photon identification. The organic scintillators and wavelengthshifting fibres of the detector are known to degrade with LHC operation, which will be extended by the High-Luminosity LHC phase. The objective of this research plan is to study the impact of radiation damage into the performance of TileCal measurements such as jets, electrons/photons or others, to timely diagnose the need for dedicated mitigation strategies. Current lower limits on the optical detector response will be used to simulate future scenarios and, e.g., the jet energy resolution will be determined and employed as a performance metric. Laboratory irradiations of scintillators and wavelength-shifter fibres will be carried on. The irradiated materials will be characterised at LIP’s Laboratory of Optics and Scintillating Materials (LOMaC) for their radiation damage profile in terms of dose rate and geometric properties. These complementary data is expected to give useful input to the simulation model. Moreover, the TileCal performance history with dose exposure together with laboratory data on radiation hardness of TileCal’s components is a very useful and timely input to the design of future collider experiments.