Browsing by Author "Bieleviciute, Auguste"

The high luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will result in higher collision rates and current equipment is not up to par with this future era of operations. Identification and reconstruction of hard interactions may be hampered by the spatial overlapping of particle tracks and energy deposits from additional collisions and this often leads to false triggers. In addition, current particle detectors suffer from radiation damage that severely affects the accuracy of our results. The new minimum ionizing particle (MIP) timing detector will be equipped with low gain avalanche detectors which have a comparably small timing resolution that helps with the track reconstruction and their thin design limits the radiation damage over time. In this thesis, we build an experimental set-up in order to study the timing resolution of these detectors closely. In order to find the timing resolution, we take the time difference between the signals from two detectors and put it in a histogram to which we apply a Gaussian fit. The standard deviation of this Gaussian is called the time spread from which we can estimate the timing resolution. We first build, characterize and improve our experimental set-up using reference samples with known timing resolution until our set-up is able to reproduce the reference value. Then we repeat the measurements with irradiated samples in order to study how radiation damage impacts timing. We were able to adjust our setup with reference samples until we measured a timing resolution of 33$\pm$2~ps. We use this result to calculate the timing resolution of an irradiated sample ($8.0 \times 10^{14}$ proton fluence) and we found a timing resolution of 62$\pm$2~ps. This thesis also discusses the analysis of the data and how the data can be re-analyzed to try to improve the final result.