LHCb calorimeter electronics. Photon identification. Calorimeter calibration

LHCb is one of the four large experiments installed on the LHC accelerator ring. The aim of the detector is to precisely measure CP violation observables and rare decays in the B meson sector. The calorimeter system of LHCb is made of four sub-systems: the scintillating pad detector, the preshower, the electromagnetic (ECAL) and hadronic (HCAL) calorimeters. It is essential to reconstruct B decays, to efficiently trigger on interesting events and to identify electrons and photons. After a review of the LHCb detector sub-systems, the first part of this document describes the calorimeter electronics. First, the front-end electronics in charge of measuring the ECAL and HCAL signals from the photomultipliers is presented, then the following section is an overview of the control card of the four calorimeters. The chapters three and four concern the test software of this electronics and the technological choices making it tolerant to radiations in the LHCb cavern environment. The measurements performed to ensure this tolerance are also given. The second part of this document concerns both the identification of the photons with LHCb and the calibration of the calorimeters. The photon identification method is presented and the performances given. Finally, the absolute energy calibration of the PRS and ECAL, based on the data stored in 2010 is explained.