Development of a 10 picosecond time-of-flight Counter

This Advanced Detector Research proposal presented a plan to develop an extremely fast time-of-flight detector for measuring the arrival time of beam protons scattered at small angles in high energy hadron colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The proposed detectors employ a gas or quartz Cerenkov radiator which produce light when a proton passes through them, coupled to a micro-channel plate photomultiplier tube (MCP-PMT) that converts the light to an electrical pulse. The very small jitter of the pulse time provided by the MCP-PMT, combined with downstream electronics that accurately measure the pulse time results in a time-of-flight measurement of unprecedented accuracy. This ADR proposal was extremely successful, culminating in the development of a 10 ps resolution time-of-flight system, about an order of magnitude better than any time-of-flight system previously deployed at a collider experiment. The primary areas of advance were the usage of new radiator geometries providing fast detector signals, using multiple measurements to obtain a superior system resolution, and development of an electronics readout system tuned to maintain the excellent timing afforded by the detector. Test beam and laser tests have improved the knowledge of MCP-PMT’s and enabled the evaluation of the new detector concepts. In addition to being a generally useful detector concept, these fast timing detectors are a major component of proposed upgrades to the LHC ATLAS and CMS detectors, and if deployed could significantly enhance the discovery potential of these detectors, including contributions to the measurement of the properties of the Higgs Boson. In addition to the potential for furthering fundamental understanding of nature, the knowledge gained on MCP-PMT’s could be useful in developing improved versions of these devices which have promise in diverse fields such as biological and medical imaging