Compact Frontend-Electronics and Bidirectional 3.3 Gbps Optical Datalink for Fast Proportional Chamber Readout

The 9600 channels of the multi-wire proportional chamber of the H1 experiment at HERA have to be read out within 96 ns and made available to the trigger system. The tight spatial conditions at the rear end flange require a compact bidirectional readout electronics with minimal power consumption and dead material. A solution using 40 identical optical link modules, each transferring the trigger information with a physical rate of 4 x 832 Mbps via optical fibers, has been developed and commisioned. The analog pulses from the chamber can be monitored and the synchronization to the global HERA clock signal is ensured.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure

SEU Robustness, Total Dose Radiation Hardness and Analogue Performance of the Beetle Chip

The Beetle is a 128 channel readout chip for silicon strip detectors in LHCb. In addition to the pipelined readout path known from the RD20 architecture which can be used either in analogue or binary mode, the Beetle features an additional prompt binary readout path, used for the LHCb pile-up veto counters and a triple-redundant layout of the control logic. It is manufactured in commercial 0.25 µm CMOS technology using radiation hard design techniques. In addition to a total dose irradiation with X-rays, an SEU irradiation test with 65 MeV protons was performed with Beetle1.3. The results of this test are presented together with new results from the Beetle versions 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5, which were submitted in the Beetle ER engineering run in May 2004

Performance of the Beetle readout chip for LHCb

Beetle is a 128-channel readout chip, which will be used in the silicon vertex detector, the pile-up veto counters and the silicon tracker of the LHCb experiment at CERN. A further application of the Beetle chip is the readout of the LHCb RICH, in case it is equipped with multi-anode PMTs. The scope of this paper is the design changes leading to the latest version 1.3 of the Beetle readout chip. In addition, measurements on earlier versions and simulation results driving these changes are shown

Enhanced Radiation Hardness and Faster Front Ends for the Beetle Readout Chip

This paper summarizes the recent progress in the development of the 128 channel pipelined readout chip Beetle, which is intended for the silicon vertex detector, the inner tracker, the pile-up veto trigger and the RICH detectors of LHCb. Deficiencies found in the front end of the Beetle Version 1.0 and 1.1 chips resulted in the submissions of BeetleFE 1.1 and BeetleFE 1.2, while BeetleSR 1.0 implements test circuits to provide future Beetle chips with logic circuits hardened against single event upset (SEU). Section I. motivates the development of new front ends for the Beetle chip, and section II. summarizes their concepts and construction. Section III. reports preliminary results from the BeetleFE 1.1 and BeetleFE 1.2 chips, while section IV. describes the BeetleSR 1.0 chip. An outlook on future test and development of the Beetle chip is given in section V

Beam Test of Silicon Strip Sensors for the ZEUS Micro Vertex Detector

For the HERA upgrade, the ZEUS experiment has designed and installed a high precision Micro Vertex Detector (MVD) using single sided micro-strip sensors with capacitive charge division. The sensors have a readout pitch of 120 microns, with five intermediate strips (20 micron strip pitch). An extensive test program has been carried out at the DESY-II testbeam facility. In this paper we describe the setup developed to test the ZEUS MVD sensors and the results obtained on both irradiated and non-irradiated single sided micro-strip detectors with rectangular and trapezoidal geometries. The performances of the sensors coupled to the readout electronics (HELIX chip, version 2.2) have been studied in detail, achieving a good description by a Monte Carlo simulation. Measurements of the position resolution as a function of the angle of incidence are presented, focusing in particular on the comparison between standard and newly developed reconstruction algorithms.Comment: 41 pages, 21 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in NIM

Open and Hidden Charm Production in 920 GeV Proton-Nucleus Collisions

The HERA-B collaboration has studied the production of charmonium and open charm states in collisions of 920 GeV protons with wire targets of different materials. The acceptance of the HERA-B spectrometer covers negative values of xF up to xF=-0.3 and a broad range in transverse momentum from 0.0 to 4.8 GeV/c. The studies presented in this paper include J/psi differential distributions and the suppression of J/psi production in nuclear media. Furthermore, production cross sections and cross section ratios for open charm mesons are discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 9 figures, to be published in the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Hyperons, Charm & Beauty Hadrons (BEACH04), Chicago, IL, June 27 - July 3, 200

Search for the Flavor-Changing Neutral Current Decay D0→μ+μ−D^0 \to \mu^+\mu^- with the HERA-B Detector

We report on a search for the flavor-changing neutral current decay $D^0 \to \mu^+\mu^-$ using $50 \times 10^6$ events recorded with a dimuon trigger in interactions of 920 GeV protons with nuclei by the HERA-B experiment. We find no evidence for such decays and set a 90% confidence level upper limit on the branching fraction $Br(D^0 \to \mu^+\mu^-) <2.0 \times 10^{-6}$.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures (of which 1 double), paper to be submitted to Physics Letters

Measurement of the J/Psi Production Cross Section in 920 GeV/c Fixed-Target Proton-Nucleus Interactions

The mid-rapidity (dsigma_(pN)/dy at y=0) and total sigma_(pN) production cross sections of J/Psi mesons are measured in proton-nucleus interactions. Data collected by the HERA-B experiment in interactions of 920 GeV/c protons with carbon, titanium and tungsten targets are used for this analysis. The J/Psi mesons are reconstructed by their decay into lepton pairs. The total production cross section obtained is sigma_(pN)(J/Psi) = 663 +- 74 +- 46 nb/nucleon. In addition, our result is compared with previous measurements