The top-quark's running mass

We discuss the direct determination of the running top-quark mass from measurements of the total cross section of hadronic top-quark pair-production. The theory predictions in the MSbar scheme are very stable under scale variations and show rapid apparent convergence of the perturbative expansion. These features are explained by studying the underlying parton dynamics.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures; to appear in Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Radiative Corrections, RADCOR 2009, Ascona, Switzerland, October 200

Wafer test of the LHCb Outer Tracker TDC-Chip

The OTIS-TDC is the front end readout chip for the LHCb Outer Tracker. It is designed to measure drift times with a resolution better than 1 ns. As the chip will be directly mounted to its board, the test have to be performed on the wafer itself. As the testing period for 7 000 chips was only three weeks, many test routines have been implemented on a FPGA. Each chip is subjected to detailed probe testing to ensure the full functionality as well as a good performance. Overall 47 wafer have been tested. From the chips passing the test 2 000 have been used in the Outer Tracker front end electronic

The OTIS Reference Manual

This document describes the port definitions, electrical specifications, modes of operation and programming sequences of the OTIS TDC. The chip is developed for the Outer Tracker of the LHCb experiment. OTIS1.0 is the first full-scale prototype of this 32 channel TDC and has been submitted in April 2002 in a standard 0.25µm CMOS process. Within the clock driven architecture of the chip a DLL provides the reference for the drift time measurement. The drift time data of every channel is stored in the pipeline memory until a trigger decision arrives. A control unit provides memory and trigger management and handles data transmission to the subsequent DAQ stage. The latest chip version is OTIS1.3

The LHCb Outer Tracker Front End Electronics

This note provides an overview of the front-end electronics used to readout the drift-times of the LHCb Outer Tracker straw tube chambers. The main functional components of the readout are the ASDBLR ASIC for amplification and signal digitization, the OTIS ASIC for the time measurement and for the L0 buffering, and the GOL ASIC to serialize the digital data for the optical data transmission. The L1 buffer board used to receive the data which is sent via the optical link is a common LHCb development and is not described here. This note supersedes an earlier document [1]

The Outer Tracker Detector of the HERA-B Experiment Part I: Detector

The HERA-B Outer Tracker is a large system of planar drift chambers with about 113000 read-out channels. Its inner part has been designed to be exposed to a particle flux of up to 2.10^5 cm^-2 s^-1, thus coping with conditions similar to those expected for future hadron collider experiments. 13 superlayers, each consisting of two individual chambers, have been assembled and installed in the experiment. The stereo layers inside each chamber are composed of honeycomb drift tube modules with 5 and 10 mm diameter cells. Chamber aging is prevented by coating the cathode foils with thin layers of copper and gold, together with a proper drift gas choice. Longitudinal wire segmentation is used to limit the occupancy in the most irradiated detector regions to about 20 %. The production of 978 modules was distributed among six different laboratories and took 15 months. For all materials in the fiducial region of the detector good compromises of stability versus thickness were found. A closed-loop gas system supplies the Ar/CF4/CO2 gas mixture to all chambers. The successful operation of the HERA-B Outer Tracker shows that a large tracker can be efficiently built and safely operated under huge radiation load at a hadron collider.Comment: 28 pages, 14 figure