An MT-Style Optical Package for Optical Data Transmission

An optical package for mounting VCSEL and PIN diodes for transmitting and receiving optical signals has been developed. The diodes couple to the fibers in a commercial MT connector. The package is quite compact with its physical size significantly smaller than that of the MT connector. This design simplifies the testing and assembly of the optical components because the MT connector with the long fibers attached can be remounted with ease while preserving good light coupling efficiency.Comment: Submitted to NI

Incorporation of the statistical uncertainty in the background estimate into the upper limit on the signal

We present a procedure for calculating an upper limit on the number of signal events which incorporates the Poisson uncertainty in the background, estimated from control regions of one or two dimensions. For small number of signal events, the upper limit obtained is more stringent than that extracted without including the Poisson uncertainty. This trend continues until the number of background events is comparable with the signal. When the number of background events is comparable or larger than the signal, the upper limit obtained is less stringent than that extracted without including the Poisson uncertainty. It is therefore important to incorporate the Poisson uncertainty into the upper limit; otherwise the upper limit obtained could be too stringent.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Design and Fabrication of a Radiation-Hard 500-MHz Digitizer Using Deep Submicron Technology

The proposed International Linear Collider (ILC) will use tens of thousands of beam position monitors (BPMs) for precise beam alignment. The signal from each BPM is digitized and processed for feedback control. We proposed the development of an 11-bit (effective) digitizer with 500 MHz bandwidth and 2 G samples/s. The digitizer was somewhat beyond the state-of-the-art. Moreover we planned to design the digitizer chip using the deep-submicron technology with custom transistors that had proven to be very radiation hard (up to at least 60 Mrad). The design mitigated the need for costly shielding and long cables while providing ready access to the electronics for testing and maintenance. In FY06 as we prepared to submit a chip with test circuits and a partial ADC circuit we found that IBM had changed the availability of our chosen IC fabrication process (IBM 6HP SiGe BiCMOS), making it unaffordable for us, at roughly 3 times the previous price. This prompted us to change our design to the IBM 5HPE process with 0.35 µm feature size. We requested funding for FY07 to continue the design work and submit the first prototype chip. Unfortunately, the funding was not continued and we will summarize below the work accomplished so far

Optical Link of the Atlas Pixel Detector

The on-detector optical link of the ATLAS pixel detector contains radiation-hard receiver chips to decode bi-phase marked signals received on PIN arrays and data transmitter chips to drive VCSEL arrays. The components are mounted on hybrid boards (opto-boards). We present results from the irradiation studies with 24 GeV protons up to 32 Mrad (1.2 x 10^15 p/cm^2) and the experience from the production.Comment: 9th ICATPP Conference, Como, Ital

Radiation-Hard Optical Link for SLHC

We study the feasibility of fabricating an optical link for the SLHC ATLAS silicon tracker based on the current pixel optical link architecture. The electrical signals between the current pixel modules and the optical modules are transmitted via micro-twisted cables. The optical signals between the optical modules and the data acquisition system are transmitted via radiation-hard/low-bandwidth SIMM fibres fusion spliced to radiation-tolerant/medium-bandwidth GRIN fibres. The link has several nice features. We have measured the bandwidths of the micro twisted-pair cables to be ~ 1 Gb/s and the fusion spliced fibre ribbon to be ~ 2 Gb/s. We have irradiated PIN and VCSEL arrays with 24 GeV protons and find the arrays can operate up to the SLHC dosage. We have also demonstrated the feasibility of fabricating a novel opto-pack for housing VCSEL and PIN arrays with BeO as the substrate.Comment: 8th International Conference on Large Scale Applications and Radiation Hardness of Semiconductor Detectors, Florence, Italy, 200

Review of Rare and Forbidden τ\tau Decays

This is a review of rare and forbidden decays of the $\tau$ lepton. For the rare decays, this includes new results on the chiral anomaly decay \taupietapio, new upper limits on the second-class-current decay \taupieta, and the observations of the Cabibbo-suppressed decay \tauketa and the internal conversion decay \taueee. For the forbidden decays, there are new upper limits on the radiative decays \tauegamma and \taumugamma. Some forbidden decays which have not been previously searched for are also suggested

ATLAS Pixel Opto-Electronics

We have developed two radiation-hard ASICs for optical data transmission in the ATLAS pixel detector at the LHC at CERN: a driver chip for a Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) diode for 80 Mbit/s data transmission from the detector, and a Bi-Phase Mark decoder chip to recover the control data and 40 MHz clock received optically by a PIN diode. We have successfully implemented both ASICs in 0.25 micron CMOS technology using enclosed layout transistors and guard rings for increased radiation hardness. We present results of the performance of these chips, including irradiation with 24 GeV protons up to 61 Mrad (2.3 x 10e15 p/cm^2).Comment: 17 pages, 23 figures, submitted to NIM Added references. Added figure 15. Moved sec. IV to sec. I

Thermodynamics of Large-N_f QCD at Finite Chemical Potential

We extend the previously obtained results for the thermodynamic potential of hot QCD in the limit of large number of fermions to non-vanishing chemical potential. We give exact results for the thermal pressure in the entire range of temperature and chemical potential for which the presence of a Landau pole is negligible numerically. In addition we compute linear and non-linear quark susceptibilities at zero chemical potential, and the entropy at small temperatures. We compare with the available perturbative results and determine their range of applicability. Our numerical accuracy is sufficiently high to check and verify existing results, including the recent perturbative results by Vuorinen on quark number susceptibilities and the older results by Freedman and McLerran on the pressure at zero temperature and high chemical potential. We also obtain a number of perturbative coefficients at sixth order in the coupling that have not yet been calculated analytically. In the case of both non-zero temperature and non-zero chemical potential, we investigate the range of validity of a scaling behaviour noticed recently in lattice calculations by Fodor, Katz, and Szabo at moderately large chemical potential and find that it breaks down rather abruptly at $\mu_q \gtrsim \pi T$, which points to a presumably generic obstruction for extrapolating data from small to large chemical potential. At sufficiently small temperatures $T \ll \mu_q$, we find dominating non-Fermi-liquid contributions to the interaction part of the entropy, which exhibits strong nonlinearity in the temperature and an excess over the free-theory value.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, JHEP style; v2: several updates, rewritten and extended sect. 3.4 covering now "Entropy at small temperatures and non-Fermi-liquid behaviour"; v3: additional remarks at the end of sect. 3.4; v4: minor corrections and additions (version to appear in JHEP

Study of the Radiation Hardness of VCSEL and PIN Arrays

The silicon trackers of the ATLAS experiment at LHC (CERN) use optical links for data transmission. VCSEL arrays operating at 850 nm are used to transmit optical signals while PIN arrays are used to convert the optical signals into electrical signals. We investigate the feasibility of using the devices at the Super LHC (SLHC). We irradiated VCSEL and GaAs PIN arrays from three vendors and silicon PIN arrays from one vendor. All arrays can be operated up to the SLHC dosage except the GaAs PIN arrays which have very low responsivities after irradiation and hence are probably not suitable for the SLHC application

Time-resolved X-ray scattering studies on bacteriophage assemblies

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