National Technical University of Athens

Physicist

Greece

Development of the Level-1 Central Trigger system of the ATLAS detector.

CERN

Senior Fellow

The goal of the New Small Wheel (NSW) Upgrade project of ATLAS is to replace the innermost station of the endcap muon system with new detectors during the next long shutdown in 2019/20. For particle detection, tracking and triggering, two different detector technologies will be used: MicroMesh Gaseous Structure (Micromegas) and small-strip Thin Gap Chambers (sTGC). Both are capable of operating under the high background rates expected during future LHC operation.
The detectors are integrated at CERN, and surface commissioning is the last testing step before operating in the ATLAS cavern.

ATLAS experiment

Detector Commissioning Coordinator

The ATLAS experiment is one of the largest LHC experiments at CERN. It is a general purpose experiment that detects particles originating from proton collisions at its center. This thesis was carried out in the frame of an ATLAS upgrade, namely the New Small Wheel, which is meant to allow ATLAS to cope with higher requirements when the LHC starts up again. In the following chapters, a brief description of ATLAS and its operation will be given. Then, the focus will be presenting the work for this thesis. Namely: • the motivation for the New Small Wheel upgrade and its composition. • the operation of Micromegas detectors, which are included in the New Small Wheel. This will include description of the principle of operation as well as the multiple tests of prototypes and production modules of this detector during the development phase in order to create a system to cope with the requirements of the HL-LHC upgrade. • the outline of the control system of ATLAS, focusing on software development for this system. This module includes study of the Slow Control Adapter integrated circuit, which will be used for configuration and monitoring of the front-end electronics in ATLAS. Moreover, it includes software development for preparation of the corresponding packets and communication with the integrated circuit. Finally, there were tests and demonstrator cases for the operation of the software with the chip and electronics. • the design of the services system of the New Small Wheel upgrade. This system was developed in cooperation with multiple expert teams on gas, cooling, fiber optics, high voltage and other sub- systems. Their design, requirements and limitations will be described.

NTUA

PhD student

I have been working on my thesis since early Spring of 2014. The topic is: "Design of the read-out system of the MicroMegas detectors for the upgrade of ATLAS-New Small Wheel at CERN.
So far the team is designing 3D models of the circuit boards (higher and lower levels of representations), cooling system, cabling and packing, as well as the detector as a whole.
At the time that this was written, we expect to start testing a prototype.

Senior year project

I was part of the group AG-Dekorsy, working on Tera- and GigaHertz laser measurements at first, and later we started to put together a Yb:KYW Laser using a 6 mirror cavity. Due to time and material constraints I was not part of the finishing touches.

University of Konstanz

IAESTE Intern

I worked on a project at the Beam Transfer Physics Dpt (TE-ABT-BTP) which concluded with a report entitled:
- Development of automatic knob-generation tool for the protection devices in the LHC".
After an introduction to Beam Physics, our time was partially devoted to programming with MAD-X (Accelerator beam-line simulation) to understand Beta functions etc.
Thereafter, we continued with JMAD (Java implementation of MAD-X) to  automate the trajectory and focus of the beam throughout the transfer lines from the SPS to the LHC.

Aimilianos Koulouris