sPHENIX is a new detector at RHIC.

[Mickey Chiu <chiu AT bnl.gov>]

Hi,

As I discussed with Ed, this is more of a general abstract that isn’t 
explicitly an abstract for sPHENIX, but I thought I should send this out 
anyway to sPHENIX since it has general interest for the collaboration.  There 
didn’t seem to be an upgrades list, so I defaulted to sending it out to the 
general list.  Feel free to send me any comments you may have.

Thanks!

Sincerely,
Mickey
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High Resolution TOF Development for PID at RHIC and the EIC

We have pursued R&D intended to push the state of the art in TOF technology,
and have demonstrated resolutions of ~20 ps with mRPCs using mostly commercial
off-the-shelf components.  Assuming a total resolution of 20 ps and a distance
of 85 cm such a TOF could achieve 3$\sigma$ separation for $\pi$/K and K/p of
2.3 and 3.9 GeV, respectively.  If such a detector were to be installed in
sPHENIX, it would have PID performance that is comparable to what has been
available at STAR and PHENIX, but with over 15 times the statistics within 
just
one year of running. The major challenge for building such a high performing
TOF detector for collider experiments (such as sPHENIX) is to develop
electronics capable of very high timing resolution that can scale to read out
O(10K) channels, while remaining within constraints on power and cost.  
Another
challenge is the system aspects of such a high performing system, including
distributing a synchronous clock with sub-20 ps jitter over several meters.  
We
present our current status in developing such a readout system called the
DRS4GLO, which is based on the DRS4 ASIC. The system is designed based on a
locally triggered windowed readout to handle data rates of 15 kHz, while
maintaining a timing resolution of less than 10 ps.