Readout Firmware of the Vertex Locator for LHCb Run 3 and beyond

The new LHCb Vertex Locator (VELO) for LHCb, comprising a new pixel detector and readout electronics, will be installed in 2021 for data taking in Run 3 at the LHC. The electronics centers around the 'VeloPix' ASIC at the front-end operating in a trigger-less readout at 40MHz. A custom serializer, called gigabit wireline transmitter (GWT), and associated custom protocol have been designed for the VeloPix. The GWT data are sent from the serializers of the VeloPix at a line rate of 5.12 Gb/s, reaching a total data rate of 2-3 Tb/s for the full VELO detector. Data are sent over 300-m optic-fiber links to the control and readout electronics cards for deserialization and processing in Intel Arria 10 FPGAs. Because of the VeloPix trigger-less design, latency variances up to 12 $mu ext{s}$ can occur between adjacent datagrams. It is therefore essential to buffer and synchronize the data in firmware prior to onward propagation or suffer a huge CPU-processing penalty. This article will describe the architecture of the readout firmware in detail with focus given to the resynchronization mechanism and techniques for cauterization. Issues found during readout commissioning, and scaling resource utilization, along with the their solutions, will be illustrated. The latest results of the firmware data-processing chain can be presented as well as the verification procedures employed in simulation. Challenges for the next generation of the detector will also be presented with ideas for a readout processing solution

Observation of an exotic narrow doubly charmed tetraquark

Conventional, hadronic matter consists of baryons and mesons made of three quarks and a quark-antiquark pair, respectively(1,2). Here, we report the observation of a hadronic state containing four quarks in the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment. This so-called tetraquark contains two charm quarks, a (u) over bar and a (d) over tilde quark. This exotic state has a mass of approximately 3,875 MeV and manifests as a narrow peak in the mass spectrum of (DD0)-D-0 pi(+) mesons just below the D*D-+(0) mass threshold. The near-threshold mass together with the narrow width reveals the resonance nature of the state

Constraints on the CKM angle gamma from B-+/- -> Dh(+/-) decays using D -> h(+/-)h'(-/+)pi(0) final states

A data sample collected with the LHCb detector corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 9 fb(-1) is used to measure eleven CP violation observables in B-+/- -> Dh(+/-) decays, where h is either a kaon or a pion. The neutral D meson decay is reconstructed in the three-body final states: K-+/-pi(-/+)pi(0); pi(+)pi(-)pi(0); K+ K- pi(0) and the suppressed pi K-+(-/+)pi(0) combination. The mode where a large CP asymmetry is expected, B-+/- -> [K-+/-pi(-/+)pi(0)] K-D(+/-), is observed with a significance greater than seven standard deviations. The ratio of the partial width of this mode relative to that of the favoured mode, B-+/- -> [K-+/-pi(-/+)pi(0)] K-D(+/-), is R-ADS(K) = (1.27 +/- 0.16 +/- 0.02) x 10(-2). Evidence for a large CP asymmetry is also seen: A(ADS(K)) = - 0.38 +/- 0.12 +/- 0.02. Constraints on the CKM angle gamma are calculated from the eleven reported observables