The LHCb front-end electronics and data acquisition system

The LHCb experiment is the most recently approved of the four experiments under construction at CERN's LHC accelerator. It is a special purpose experiment designed to precisely measure the CP violation parameters in the B– B ̄ system and to study rare B-decays. Triggering poses special problems...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment, 2000-10, Vol.453 (1), p.377-381
Main Author: Jost, Beat
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Data acquisition system
Event-building network
Front-end electronics
LHCb experiment
Readout protocol
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The LHCb experiment is the most recently approved of the four experiments under construction at CERN's LHC accelerator. It is a special purpose experiment designed to precisely measure the CP violation parameters in the B– B ̄ system and to study rare B-decays. Triggering poses special problems since the interesting events containing B-mesons are immersed in a large background of inelastic p–p reactions. We therefore decided to implement a four-level triggering scheme. The LHCb data acquisition (DAQ) system will have to cope with an average trigger rate of 40 kHz, after two levels of hardware triggers, and an average event size of 100 kB. Thus, an event-building network which can sustain an average bandwidth of 4 GB/s is required. A powerful software trigger farm will have to be installed to reduce the rate from 40 kHz to 100 Hz of events written for permanent storage. In this paper we will outline the general architectures of the front-end electronics and of the trigger and DAQ system and the readout protocols we plan to implement.
ISSN:0168-9002
1872-9576
DOI:10.1016/S0168-9002(00)00660-4