Speaker
Tomas Sykora
(Institute of Particle and Nuclear Physics, Faculty of Mathematics & Physics, Charles University)
Description
In 2016 the ATLAS collaboration successfully installed a part of the ATLAS Forward Proton (AFP) detector to measure diffractive protons leaving under very small angles (hundreds of micro radians) the ATLAS proton-proton interaction point. The AFP aims to tag and measure forward protons scattered in single diffraction or hard central diffraction, where two protons are emitted and a central system is created. In addition, the AFP has a potential to measure two-photon exchange processes, and be sensitive to eventual anomalous quartic couplings of Vector Bosons: $\gamma\gamma W^+W^-$, $\gamma\gamma ZZ$, and $\gamma\gamma\gamma\gamma$. Such measurements at high luminosities will be possible only due the combination of high resolution tracking detectors and ultra-high precision time-of-flight (ToF) detectors at both sides of the ATLAS detector. In its first, current, phase the AFP detector consists of one arm with two semi-edgeless 3D Silicon pixel detectors, each placed in a horizontal Roman Pot. Both Pots are placed at one ATLAS side, 205 and 217 meters away from the ATLAS interaction point, very close (2-3 mm during data taking) to the LHC beams. The detector system construction, its installation in the LHC tunnel and commissioning (including full integration of the AFP into the ATLAS detector control system and trigger and data acquisition) will be presented together with the detector performance plots based on the data taking during the standard LHC running. The second phase of the AFP realization, planned to the beginning of 2017 and including the installation of the AFP second arm together with ToF Quartz-Cherenkov subdetectors (housed in both farther Roman Pots) will be described in the second part of the talk.
Primary author
Tomas Sykora
(Institute of Particle and Nuclear Physics, Faculty of Mathematics & Physics, Charles University)
