LHCb: Beam and Background Monitoring and the Upgrade of the Timing and Fast Control System of the LHCb experiment at CERN

The LHCb experiment at CERN is preparing for first real data taking, foreseen by the end of the year 2009 with the start-up of the LHC. A large amount of work of commissioning, tests and improvements of the full detector has been done in order to optimize its performance. During my first year as a Doctoral Student at CERN, I have been working on the timing and readout control of the LHCb experiment in the frame of the LHCb Online group. The group is responsible for the full data acquisition of the LHCb experiment, from the Front-End Electronics (FEE) to the storage of the data for offline analysis, as well as the Timing and Fast Control (TFC) system. The latter controls and distributes centrally timing and trigger information, as well as synchronous and asynchronous commands to the readout system. It is also responsible for receiving and adjusting the bunch and orbit clocks of the LHC machine and distributing it to the electronics of the whole experiment. It is of vital importance to assure that the timing of the entire dataflow is well adjusted. In this context, I have been implementing and putting in operation a Beam Phase and Intensity Monitor (BPIM). This system is able to measure bunch-by-bunch the intensity and the phase of the proton beam in the accelerator with respect to the bunch clock. I am also involved in a proposal for a new timing transmission system in LHCb which is meant to improve the jitter along the entire readout chain. Moreover, the monitoring of the beam and its background is crucial in order to understand and optimize the experimental conditions for the data recorded by the experiment. I am working on a proposal to use the BPIM for fast readout of the LHCb Beam Loss Scintillators, a set of cubic plastic scintillators located around the beam pipe which could detect fast beam losses during injection and circulating beams. After the initial period of getting acquainted with the current timing and fast control system, my main topic of study is the upgrade of the TFC system for the upgrade of the entire LHCb experiment. It should allow the experiment to cope with an increase of a factor 10 in luminosity and 40 in the readout frequency. A proposal for a totally new TFC architecture and technologies has been published and has been presented at the 16th Real Time Conference in Beijing. Two types of boards equipped with the latest FPGAs on the market will manage the 16 Tbits/s readout from the custom FEE and over a data acquisition network based on IP-over-Infiniband. A complete simulation framework and a first prototype to validate the concepts are in preparation