Stacy ( Montville Township H.S.)
Mentor: Ted Lui
In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), clusters of protons are accelerated to extremely high speeds and collided inside a detector. In order to observe a rare event, the number of collisions needs to be very high. Luminosity is a measure of the efficiency of an accelerator and its ability to produce a large number of collisions; the higher the luminosity, the higher the number of collisions per second. In the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Detector, a Level 1 Tracking Trigger is used to reconstruct the paths of the particles from the collision. It then compares known paths to that input data stream, thus requiring extremely fast data communication and massive pattern recognition power. With a divide and conquer strategy, the data from the collision separated from 48 sections in the detector to Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture Crates (ATCA) with a full mesh backplane to connect each of the ten to fourteen Pulsar II boards within the crate directly. Within each Pulsar II board, there are high speed links to the Rear Transition Module, backplane, and mezzanine card. This summer, I worked on testing the Pulsar II boards to study the performances of these high speed links. By making sure all of the connections are high quality, more steps can be taken towards the advancement of the Pulsar II board for future use with the CMS Detector.