This MRI Consortium Acquisition Award provides support for particle physics groups at Ohio State University and Southern Methodist University to upgrade their electronic and diagnostic instrumentation, to allow them to lead the development of very high-speed optical data links for the upgrade of ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland. While the instrumentation will have direct impact on specific subsystems of ATLAS including the IBL (or insertable B layer) of the Pixel Detector and for Liquid Argon (LAr) Calorimetry, the instrumentation have will have broader applicability to a wide variety of applications requiring ultra high-speed data links. The intellectual merit of the work is directly related to the discovery potential of ATLAS, which with CMS in 2012 co-discovered a Higgs Boson. Following that discovery, the ATLAS collaboration has continued its search for evidence of other beyond the Standard Model physics including super symmetry, for which the pixel detector and LAr systems are central. This includes the study of final states containing third-generation quarks: b-quarks with decay vertices detected in the pixel system, and top quarks, with leptons and jets, whose energy (and missing energy) is a principal measurement responsibility of the LAr Calorimetry system. The broader impacts of the program include the enhancement to campus laboratories of the proponents, which will directly impact research and training of graduate and undergraduate students, and which is expected to foster interactions with other campus researchers in including those engineering and other science disciplines.
