Warm liquid calorimetry for LHC

Results from the beam tests of the U/TMP "warm liquid" calorimeter show that such a technique is very promising for the LHC. Our aim is to extend this programme and design a calorimeter that can satisfy the requirements of high rates, high radiation levels, compensation, uniformity and granularity, as well as fully contain hadronic showers. We propose to construct liquid ionization chambers operated at very high fields, capable of collecting the total charge produced by ionizing particles within times comparable to the bunch crossing time of the future Collider. For this reason we plan to extend the current programme on tetramethylpentane (TMP) to tetramethylsilane (TMSi). An electromagnetic calorimeter consisting of very high field ionization chambers filled with TMSi as sensitive medium with Uranium and/or other high density material as absorber will first be built (to be followed by a full-scale calorimeter module), on which newly designed fast amplifiers and readout electronics will be tested. In addition, a fully assembled supergondola will be installed in ECA 5 in order to test noise and cross-talk in a real environment

A new platform for ultra-high dose rate radiobiological research using the BELLA PW laser proton beamline.

Radiotherapy is the current standard of care for more than 50% of all cancer patients. Improvements in radiotherapy (RT) technology have increased tumor targeting and normal tissue sparing. Radiations at ultra-high dose rates required for FLASH-RT effects have sparked interest in potentially providing additional differential therapeutic benefits. We present a new experimental platform that is the first one to deliver petawatt laser-driven proton pulses of 2 MeV energy at 0.2 Hz repetition rate by means of a compact, tunable active plasma lens beamline to biological samples. Cell monolayers grown over a 10 mm diameter field were exposed to clinically relevant proton doses ranging from 7 to 35 Gy at ultra-high instantaneous dose rates of 107 Gy/s. Dose-dependent cell survival measurements of human normal and tumor cells exposed to LD protons showed significantly higher cell survival of normal-cells compared to tumor-cells for total doses of 7 Gy and higher, which was not observed to the same extent for X-ray reference irradiations at clinical dose rates. These findings provide preliminary evidence that compact LD proton sources enable a new and promising platform for investigating the physical, chemical and biological mechanisms underlying the FLASH effect

A highly segmented and compact liquid argon calorimeter for the LHC: the TGT calorimeter

The development of a fast, highly granular and compact electromagnetic liquid argon calorimeter is proposed as an R&D project for an LHC calorimeter with full rapidity coverage. The proposed ``Thin Gap Turbine'' (TGT) calorimeter offers uniform energy response and constant energy resolution independent of the production angle of the impinging particle and of its impact position at the calorimeter. An important aspect of the project is the development of electronics for fast signal processing matched to the short charge collection time in the TGT read-out cell. The system aspects of the integration of a high degree of signal processing into the liquid argon would be investigated