Thesis

Radiation Damage of Optical Components in Scintillator Detectors: from ATLAS/LHC Tile Calorimeter to Future Experiments

• Call:

  PT-CERN Call 2021/1

• Academic Year:

  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, hadrons and the missing energy, participating in the trigger and electron/photon identification. The organic scintillators and wavelength-shifting fibres of the detector are known to degrade with LHC operation, which will be extended by the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) phase. The objective of the thesis is to study the radiation damage of these optical components, extrapolating their degradation to the HL-LHC. Additionally, the TileCal performance history with dose exposure is a useful and timely input to the design of future collider experiments. Another objective is to explore how the detector design parameters, eg. scintillator/fibre sizes, correlate with the light yield degradation using Machine Learning. The thesis also comprises the optical characterisation of scintillator samples based new organic materials within the scope of an R&D project on scintillators for future detectors.