Amplifier Design for the Higgs Boson Search

Integrated circuits and devices have been a cornerstone in the recent discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Laboratory for High Energy Physics (CERN) in Geneva. Particles are accelerated and brought into collision at well-defined interaction points. Detectors, giant cameras of about 40 m long by 20 m in diameter, constructed around these interaction points take pictures of the collision products as they fly away from the interaction point. They contain millions of channels often generating a small (∼1 fC) electric charge upon particle traversals. Integrated circuits provide the readout in a very aggressive radiation environment and accept collision rates of about 40 MHz with on-line selection of potentially interesting events before data storage. Power consumption directly impacts the measurement quality as it governs the amount of material present in the detector, and often the fraction of the power consumed by the front end amplifiers is significant if not predominant. We present basic architectures and a selection of front end amplifiers we hope as a representative overview for various types of particle detectors operated at LHC.