60 GHz high data rate wireless links for high energy physics applications

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, was constructed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the 27-km circular tunnel on the border between France and Switzerland. In this circular tunnel, two counter-rotating beams of heavy ions or protons are accelerated and collided at a combined energy of up to 13 TeV. The detectors are in place at different collision points to collect the particles produced by the collisions. The readout data from these collected particles is huge, for instance it is in Tbps at the ATLAS silicon microstrip tracker. The availability of unlicensed 9 GHz bandwidth at 60 GHz (57–66 GHz) has the potential to fulfil this demand, as a single link can achieve multi-Gbps. A strong motivation for using wireless data transmission is the absence of wires and connectors which will be an advantage in areas with low material budget and will also reduce the passive material. This passive material degrades the tracker performance through scattering and particle conversion. Besides, wireless transmission allows radial readout through the layers, which opens for topological readout of tracking data instead of current axial wired links. This topological readout of the tracking data can also reduce the on-detector data volume using inter-layer communications, and will drastically reduce the readout time and latency.