A new method based on noise counting to monitor the frontend electronics of the LHCb muon detector

A new method has been developed to check the correct behaviour of the frontend electronics of the LHCb muon detector. This method is based on the measurement of the electronic noise rate at different thresholds of the frontend discriminator. The method was used to choose the optimal discriminator thresholds. A procedure based on this method was implemented in the detector control system and allowed the detection of a small percentage of frontend channels which had deteriorated. A Monte Carlo simulation has been performed to check the validity of the method

Gas leakage and HV test procedure for the INFN Muon MWPCs

The Muon MWPCs produced by INFN laboratories are subject to gas leakage and HV tests before the installation on the LHCb experiment. The test procedure and the software tools developed are described in this paper

Performance of the LHCb muon system with cosmic rays

The LHCb Muon system performance is presented using cosmic ray events collected in 2009. These events allowed to test and optimize the detector configuration before the LHC start. The space and time alignment and the measurement of chamber efficiency, time resolution and cluster size are described in detail. The results are in agreement with the expected detector performance.Comment: Submitted to JINST and accepte

Performance of the LHCb muon system

The performance of the LHCb Muon system and its stability across the full 2010 data taking with LHC running at ps = 7 TeV energy is studied. The optimization of the detector setting and the time calibration performed with the first collisions delivered by LHC is described. Particle rates, measured for the wide range of luminosities and beam operation conditions experienced during the run, are compared with the values expected from simulation. The space and time alignment of the detectors, chamber efficiency, time resolution and cluster size are evaluated. The detector performance is found to be as expected from specifications or better. Notably the overall efficiency is well above the design requirementsComment: JINST_015P_1112 201

First observation of Bs -> D_{s2}^{*+} X mu nu decays

Using data collected with the LHCb detector in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, the semileptonic decays Bs -> Ds+ X mu nu and Bs -> D0 K+ X mu nu are detected. Two structures are observed in the D0 K+ mass spectrum at masses consistent with the known D^+_{s1}(2536) and $D^{*+}_{s2}(2573) mesons. The measured branching fractions relative to the total Bs semileptonic rate are B(Bs -> D_{s2}^{*+} X mu nu)/B(Bs -> X mu nu)= (3.3\pm 1.0\pm 0.4)%, and B(Bs -> D_{s1}^+ X munu)/B(Bs -> X mu nu)= (5.4\pm 1.2\pm 0.5)%, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic. This is the first observation of the D_{s2}^{*+} state in Bs decays; we also measure its mass and width.Comment: 8 pages 2 figures. Published in Physics Letters

Prompt K_short production in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=0.9 TeV

The production of K_short mesons in pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 0.9 TeV is studied with the LHCb detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The luminosity of the analysed sample is determined using a novel technique, involving measurements of the beam currents, sizes and positions, and is found to be 6.8 +/- 1.0 microbarn^-1. The differential prompt K_short production cross-section is measured as a function of the K_short transverse momentum and rapidity in the region 0 < pT < 1.6 GeV/c and 2.5 < y < 4.0. The data are found to be in reasonable agreement with previous measurements and generator expectations.Comment: 6+18 pages, 6 figures, updated author lis

Development of the Experiment Control System and Performance Study of the Muon Chambers for the LHCb Experiment

The work of this thesis practically opened three fronts of the LHCb muon system : the development of the control and monitoring system of the readout electronics; the study of noise and threshold of the detector; and the study of the performance of the muon chambers. The LHCb muon readout apparatus is made 1368 Multi-Wire Proportional Chambers (MWPC) and 24 Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) chambers connected to approximately 7500 16-channel front-end boards, resulting in 120000 output channels. The large-scale of this system naturally led to a complex control and monitoring system made of about 600 microcontrollers which are directly connected to the front-end electronics and handled by six computers. The development of this control system was accomplished within this thesis; the microcontroller’s firmware and the high level software, operating on the six local computers, were implemented. Besides configuring and monitoring the on-chamber readout electronics, a set of calibration and debugging oriented procedures have been developed to measure the noise, the time align and to assess the connection chains of every single channel of the detector. The threshold and noise characteristics in particular were studied deeply since they are essential to achieve the requirements of the muon system of 95% of efficiency on triggering muon particles within a 25 ns time window, given by the bunch-crossing rate of the LHC. This work was fundam ental to calibrate and prepare the muon detector to receive the first proton beams collision and it will be used during the next years of operation of the LHCb experiment. In addition, before this thesis, the different chamber’s types of the muon detector had never been evaluated in detail. Therefore, a cosmir rays acquisition system was mounted in one of the laboratories of the “La Sapienza” University (Rome, Italy) and the performance of different MWPC types of the muon system were studied considering parameters as crosstalk, efficiency and response-time resolution. The obtained results validated the muon chambers’ designs showing that the muon detector can comply to the LHCb requirements. In this thesis, the LHCb and its muon system will be described in the Chapters 1 and 2, respectively. My contributions could be divided into three parts: The development of the control system of the detector readout electronics, presented in Chapter 3; the study of the threshold configuration and the noise characteristics of the different chamber’s types of the muon system, presented in Chapter 4; and the study of the performance of the MWPC applied to the muon detector, described in Chapter 5

Gas leakage and HV test procedure for the INFN Muon MWPCs

Technical repor