ATLAS ALFA—measuring absolute luminosity with scintillating fibres

ALFA is a high-precision scintillating fibre tracking detector under construction for the absolute determination of the LHC luminosity at the ATLAS interaction point. This detector, mounted in so-called Roman Pots, will track protons elastically scattered under μrad angles at IP1.In total there are four pairs of vertically arranged detector modules which approach the LHC beam axis to mm distance. Each detector module consists of ten layers of two times 64 scintillating fibres each (U and V planes). The fibres are coupled to 64 channels Multi-Anodes PhotoMultipliers Tubes read out by compact front-end electronics. Each detector module is complemented by so-called overlap detectors: Three layers of two times 30 scintillating fibres which will be used to measure the relative positioning of two vertically arranged main detectors. The total number of channels is about 15000. Conventional plastic scintillator tiles are mounted in front of the fibre detectors and will serve as trigger counter. The extremely restricted space inside the pots makes the coupling to the read out devices very challenging. Several technologies have been tested in a beam at DESY and a cosmic-ray setup at CERN. A possible upgrade of the photo detection could consist in the replacement of the PMT by Geiger-mode avalanche photodiodes. Preliminary tests are being performed comparing the performance of these devices with the ones of the PMTs.