LHCb Upgrade II: Maximising HL-LHC Discovery Potential (Bridging Funding)
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Bristol
Department Name: Physics
Abstract
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| Description | TORCH is a new detector technology that measures the flight time of particles with a precision of 15ps, using the Cherenkov light produced by those particles as they pass through a pane of quartz. Testbeam studies proved the viability of this ambitious concept. The Bristol calibration system played a critical role in understanding the response of the very fast TORCH electronics. |
| Exploitation Route | The TORCH detector is expected to be used in the LHCb upgrade II. The photo detectors developed with our industrial partners have wide applications in particle physics and beyond. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Electronics |
| Description | LHCb Upgrade II: Maximising HL-LHC Discovery Potential |
| Amount | £107,885 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | ST/V003577/1 |
| Organisation | Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 09/2021 |
| End | 09/2024 |
| Description | Graphcore's IPUs |
| Organisation | Graphcore |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | Evaluating Graphcore's novel IPU processors, and, for the first time, implementing Particle Physics relevant software on them. Of particular interest not only to us, but also the community interested in these novel processors, is that we did not only use IPUs for machine learning (although we did that, too), but also non ML applications (Kalman Filter). Our work was also beneficial to our industrial partner in optimising and debugging their API. This work continued and led to IPUs being considered as an option for the real time analysis of LHCb events in LHCb Upgrade II. We have implement the highly complex reconstruction of the TORCH time of flight detector on IPUs and seen impressive speed gains compared to previous implementations using CPUs. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Cloud Access to IPUs and technical support. |
| Impact | Paper: https://inspirehep.net/literature/1812756 (accepted for publication) |
| Start Year | 2019 |