“The next discoveries made with the CERN LHC will be triggered by one Columbia chip and measured by another.” Columbia Engineering features a nice overview article (pdf)) of our collaboration with the Columbia ATLAS Group at the Nevis Laboratories designing two high performance, radiation-hard ADCs for the ATLAS experiment in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It has been an honor to collaborate with John Parsons, Gustaaf Brooijmans, Jaro Ban, Tim Andeen, Nan Sun, and many others.
The ’numbers’ of this experiment are mind boggling: the tunnel is 27km long, the particles race at 99.999999% of the speed of light in bunches with a bunch-crossing rate of 40MHz, creating about 1 billion collisions per second. The detector is several stories high and has more than 180,000 channels, requiring two ADCs. For the next LHC upgrade starting in 2026, more than 45,000 of our 8-channel ADC chips will be installed.
The amount of data generated is so large, that a special ’trigger path’ selects only the most interesting events to be saved and further processed. In the previous LHC upgrade in 2022, our trigger ADC chip was already installed.
Kudos to my (former) students for their contributions to these challenging projects: Ray Xu, Jayanth Kuppambatti, Sarthak Kalani, Subhajit Ray, Junhua Shen, and Michael Unanian, along side our collaborators from Nevis and University of Texas, Austin.
It’s rewarding to know that our chips will play a key part in the next discoveries physicists will make with this unique instrument.
Kudos to my (former) students for their contributions to these challenging projects: Ray Xu, Jayanth Kuppambatti, Sarthak Kalani, Subhajit Ray, Junhua Shen, and Michael Unanian, alongside our collaborators from Nevis and University of Texas, Austin.
Lead Photo Credit: ATLAS Experiment © 2025 CERN