Consortium for the Development of a Trigger Processor for a High-Energy Physics Experiment

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9977659NarainThis proposal requests equipment and engineering support for the development of fast digital electronics for the event selection of an accelerator-based high-energy physics experiment; the D0 experiment at Fermilab.The D0 experiment is one of two large international collaborations at the Fermilab Tevatron collider which are expected to be the flagship of the US effort in particle physics until the start of the LHC collider at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva Switzerland, expected after year 2005. In its first run, the D0 experiment hasproduced results on the discovery of the top quark, a measurement of its mass, precise measurements of standard model parameters such as the mass of the W boson, and new constraints on phenomena beyond the standard model.With the upgraded Tevatron collider, the D0 experiment is expected to study further the properties of the electroweak force and the top quark. Thousands of top quarks are expected to be produced in a search for new particles in its decay and new forces in its production. There will be direct searches for the Higgs boson and other signatures of electroweak symmetry breaking. The key experimental signature of these processes is the presence of b quarks, which are sufficiently long-lived and sufficiently energetic on average to travel a few millimeters from the primary collision point before they decay.The proposers intend to design and build a fast processor to identify hit patterns consistent with charged particles from the slightly displaced secondary vertex characteristic of a b-quark decay. This must be accomplished in approximately 50 microseconds while the data are being read out of the detector. To achieve the required speed, the device will employ highly parallel processing of the data from the silicon microstrip tracker. It will allow efficient isolation of the relatively rare signal events from the much more copious background. Detecting such secondary vertices during detector readout would be a new advance for experimental high energy physics. It opens dramatic new possibilities for selecting events with heavy quarks.