Darmstadt 2008 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 47: Instrumentation und Anwendungen II

HK 47.1: Vortrag

Freitag, 14. März 2008, 14:00–14:15, 2D

Integration and Commissioning of the ALICE TRD Global Tracking Unit — •Jan de Cuveland for the ALICE-TRD collaboration — Kirchhoff-Institut für Physik, Universität Heidelberg

The Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) is one of the main detectors of the ALICE experiment at the LHC. One of its primary objectives is to trigger on high momentum electrons and jets.

The trigger concept requires fast event reconstruction involving complex computations. Based on data from 1.2 million analog channels, the reconstruction must be performed within 6 µs to contribute to the Level-1 trigger decision. A dedicated hardware architecture achieves the processing in the required time by means of massive parallelism.

Optical multi-gigabit links with a total bandwidth of 2.7 TBit/s transfer pre-processed track segment data from the detector front-end electronics to the Global Tracking Unit (GTU). The GTU reconstructs tracks from up to 20 000 track segments, calculates particle momenta based on track curvatures and finally makes the trigger decision. In case of a Level-1 accept, compressed analog data is shipped to the GTU and buffered for transmission to the data acquisition system.

The GTU consists of 109 dedicated CompactPCI boards based on Xilinx Virtex-4 FX FPGAs. The complete system has been built and installed at the LHC. This presentation focuses on the commissioning of the ALICE TRD GTU system. It also summarizes results from the latest test at the CERN PS beam and from ALICE cosmics runs.

This work is supported by the BMBF (06HD9551).