Luminosity Measurements at the LHC at CERN Using Medipix, Timepix and Timepix3 Devices

Abstract

The precise determination of the luminosity is essential for many analyses in physics based on the data from the particle accelerator Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. There are different types of detectors used for the luminosity measurements. The focus of this review is on luminosity measurements with hybrid-pixel detectors and the progress made over the past decade. The first generations of detectors of the Medipix and Timepix families had frame-based readout, while Timepix3 has a quasi-continuous readout. The applications of the detectors are manifold, and in particular, the detectors have been operated in the harsh environment of the LHC. The excellent performance in detecting high fluxes of elementary particles made these detectors ideal tools to measure the delivered luminosity resulting from proton–proton collisions. Important aspects of this review are the performance improvements in relative luminosity measurements from one detector generation to another, the long-term stability of the measurements, absolute luminosity measurements, material activation (radiation-induced) corrections, and the measurement of luminosity from neutron counting. Rather than bunch-average luminosity provided by previous detector generations, owing to the excellent time-resolution, Timepix3 measured the luminosity of individual proton bunches that are 25 ns apart. This review demonstrates the large progress in the precision of luminosity measurements during LHC Run-1 and Run-2 operations using hybrid-pixel detectors, and thus their importance for luminosity measurements in the future of LHC operations.