PhD position: Picosecond resolution calorimeter

For upgrade 2 of the LHCb experiment, the calorimeter will have to undergo a complete redesign. With a factor 20 larger number of proton-proton collisions happening at the same time, there will be a huge challenge in separating the showers created by the individual photons and electrons hitting the calorimeter.

The separation of individual showers is usually achieved through a finer granularity of the calorimeter, but with the cells already smaller than the Moliere radius of the showers, there is no gain from going to a finer structure. Instead it is considered to add very accurate timing information about when the shower develops. This will allow for the separation of particles arriving just a picoseconds apart, corresponding to a few cm at the speed of light.If successful, the result will be that the effective number of simultaneous collisions can be lowered from the 20 happening in the same bunch crossing to just a few that are in the same precision timeframe.

The project will involve working within the LHCb collaboration and in particular in the calorimeter upgrade group. It will be a combination of lab work to test new technologies, work at testbeams at CERN or elsewhere to evaluate prototypes and the simulation of different design options. Part of this will centre around the use of machine learning on FPGAs to form part of the DAQ system.

You will gain extensive experience in both hardware and software skills, and in particular their boundary in terms of firmware on embedded chips. This is very valuable experience in both acedemia and industry.