Jitter impact on clock distribution in LHC experiments

The LHC Bunch Clock is one of the most important accelerator signals delivered to the experiments. Being directly derived from the Radio Frequency driving the beams in the accelerator by a simple division of its frequency by a factor of 10, the Bunch Clock signal represents the frequency at which the bunches are crossing each other at each experiment. It is thus used to synchronize all the electronics systems in charge of event detection. Its frequency is around 40.079 MHz, but varies with beam parameters (energy, particle type, etc) by a few hundreds of Hz. The present paper discusses the quality of this Bunch Clock signal in terms of jitter. It is in particular compared to typical requirements of electronic components of the LHC detectors and put in perspective with the intrinsic jitter of the beam itself, to which this signal is related.