An LHCb general-purpose acquisition board for beam and background monitoring at the LHC

In this paper we will present an LHCb custom-made acquisition board which was developed for a continuous beam and background monitoring during LHC operations at CERN. The paper describes both the conceptual design and its performance, and concludes with results from the first period of beam operations at the LHC. The main purpose of the acquisition board is to process signals from a pair of beam pickups to continuously monitor the intensity of each bunch, and to monitor the phase of the arrival time of each proton bunch with respect to the LHC bunch clock. The extreme versatility of the board also allowed the LHCb experiment to build a high-speed and high-sensitivity readout system for a fast background monitor based on a pair of plastic scintillators. The board has demonstrated very good performance and proved to be conceptually valid during the first months of operations at the LHC. Connected to the beam pickups, it provides the LHCb experiment with a real-time measurement of the total intensity of each beam and of the arrival time of each beam at the LHCb Interaction Point. It also monitors the LHC filling scheme and the beam current per bunch at a continuous rate of 40 MHz, and assures a proper global timing of LHCb. The continuous readout of the scintillators at bunch clock speed provides the LHCb experiment with high-resolution information about the beam halo and fast losses during both injection and circulating beam. It has also provided valuable information to the LHC during machine commissioning with beam. Recent results also shows that it could contribute as a luminosity monitor independent from the LHCb experiment readout system. Beam, background and luminosity measurements are continuously fed back to the LHC in the data exchange framework between the experiments and the LHC machine aimed at improving efficiently the experimental conditions real-time.