Design and performance of the ABCD3TA ASIC for readout of silicon strip detectors in the ATLAS semiconductor tracker
The ABCD3TA is a 128-channel ASIC with binary architecture for the readout of silicon strip particle detectors in the Semiconductor Tracker of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The chip comprises fast front-end and amplitude discriminator circuits using bipolar devices, a binary pipeline for first level trigger latency, a second level derandomising buffer and data compression circuitry based on CMOS
devices. It has been designed and fabricated in a BiCMOS radiation resistant process. Extensive testing of the
ABCD3TA chips assembled into detector modules show that the design meets the specifications and maintains the required performance after irradiation up to a total ionising dose of 10 Mrad and a 1-MeV neutron equivalent fluence of 2×1014 n/cm2, corresponding to 10 years of operation of the LHC at its design luminosity. Wafer screening and quality assurance procedures have been developed and implemented in large volume production to
ensure that the chips assembled into modules meet the rigorous acceptance criteria.

title: Triggering on Long-Lived Neutral Particles in the ATLAS Detector
abstract: Neutral particles with long decay paths that decay to many-particle final states represent, from an experimental point of view, a challenge both for the trigger and for the reconstruction capabilities of the ATLAS apparatus. The Hidden Valley scenario serves as an excellent setting for the purpose of exploring the challenges to the trigger posed by long-lived particles.

title: The barrel modules of the ATLAS semiconductor tracker.
abstract: This paper describes the silicon microstrip modules in the barrel section of the SemiConductor Tracker (SCT) of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The module requirements, components and assembly techniques are given, as well as first results of the module performance on the fully assembled barrels that make up the detector being installed in the ATLAS experiment.

title: Progress with the single-sided module prototypes for the ATLAS tracker upgrade stave
abstract: The ATLAS experiment is preparing for the planned luminosity upgrade of the LHC (the super-luminous LHC or sLHC) with a programme of development for tracking able to withstand an order of greater magnitude radiation fluence and much greater hit occupancy rates than the current detector. This has led to the concept of an all-silicon tracker with an enhanced performance pixel-based inner region and short-strips for much of the higher radii. Both sub-systems employ many common technologies, including the proposed “stave” concept for integrated cooling and support. For the short-strip region, use of this integrated stave concept requires single-sided modules mounted on either side of a thin central lightweight support. Each sensor is divided into four rows of 23.82 mm length strips; within each row, there are 1280 strips of 74.5μm pitch. Well over a hundred prototype sensors are being delivered by Hamamatsu Photonics (HPK) to Japan, Europe and the US. We present results of the first 20 chip ABCN25 ASIC hybrids for these sensors, results of the first prototype 5120 strip module built with 40 ABCN25 read-out ASICs, and the status of the hybrids and modules being developed for the ATLAS tracker upgrade stave programme.

title: ATLAS measurements of the properties of jets for boosted particle searches
abstract: Measurements are presented of the properties of high transverse momentum jets, produced in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of root s = 7 TeV. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 35 pb(-1) and were collected with the ATLAS detector in 2010. Jet mass, width, eccentricity, planar flow and angularity are measured for jets reconstructed using the anti-k(t) algorithm with distance parameters R 0: 6 and 1.0, with transverse momentum p(T) > 300 GeV and pseudorapidity vertical bar eta vertical bar < 2. The measurements are compared to the expectations of Monte Carlo generators that match leading-logarithmic parton showers to leading-order, or next-to-leading-order, matrix elements. The generators describe the general features of the jets, although discrepancies are observed in some distributions.

title: ATLAS beam test results
abstract: Many different configurations of electronics and semiconductor strip detectors were studied in 1995 using the ATLAS tracking detector test area at the H8 beam-line of the CERN SPS. A significant fraction of these investigations are presented elsewhere in this volume and this paper will concentrate on the results with silicon strip detectors read out with electronics preserving the pulse height information. Data has been collected with the ADAM, APV5 and FElix read-out chips on a number of different detectors. The first results are presented for read out with LHC electronics of detectors to the ATLAS-A specification of 112.5 μm pitch, employing n-strips in n-type silicon, capacitive coupling and intermediate strips. It is demonstrated that with adequate signal/noise, a spatial resolution of ⋍13 μm is attainable with these detectors.

title: KeV warm dark matter and composite neutrinos
abstract: A bstractElementary keV sterile Dirac neutrinos can be a natural ingredient of the composite neutrino scenario. For a certain class of composite neutrino theories, these sterile neutrinos naturally have the appropriate mixing angles to be resonantly produced warm dark matter (WDM). Alternatively, we show these sterile neutrinos can be WDM produced by an entropy-diluted thermal freeze-out, with the necessary entropy production arising not from an out-of-equilibrium decay, but rather from the confinement of the composite neutrino sector, provided there is sufficient supercooling.

title: Galactic center gamma-ray excess through a dark shower
abstract: The reported excess of $\gamma$-rays, emitted from an extended region around the galactic center, has a distribution and rate suggestive of an origin in dark matter (DM) annihilations. The conventional annihilation channels into standard model (SM) $b$ quarks or $\tau$ leptons may, however, be in tension with various experimental constraints on antiproton and positron fluxes. We present a framework that is free from such constraints. The key idea is that the mediators between the dark matter and the SM are themselves part of a strongly coupled sector: a hidden valley. In this scenario, the dark matter particles annihilate only into hidden quarks that subsequently shower and hadronize. Hidden quark effective couplings to SM hypercharge allow the lightest hidden bound states to subsequently decay into SM photons, producing the observed photon energy spectrum. Associated production of SM fermions is, in contrast, suppressed by electroweak, loop or helicity effects. We find that, generically, $\sim$ 10 GeV DM and a confinement scale $\sim$ 1 GeV provide a good fit to the observed spectrum. An $SU(2)$ hidden confining group is preferred over $SU(3)$ or higher rank gauge groups, up to uncertainties in the extraction of the astrophysical background. An explicit realization of this framework is also presented, and its phenomenology is discussed in detail, along with pertinent cosmological, astrophysical and collider bounds. This framework may be probed by model-independent searches, including future beam-dump experiments.

title: Probing CP Violation in $h\rightarrow\gamma\gamma$ with Converted Photons
abstract: We study Higgs diphoton decays, in which both photons undergo nuclear conversion to electron- positron pairs. The kinematic distribution of the two electron-positron pairs may be used to probe the CP violating (CPV) coupling of the Higgs to photons, that may be produced by new physics. Detecting CPV in this manner requires interference between the spin-polarized helicity amplitudes for both conversions. We derive leading order, analytic forms for these amplitudes. In turn, we obtain compact, leading-order expressions for the full process rate. While performing experiments involving photon conversions may be challenging, we use the results of our analysis to construct experimental cuts on certain observables that may enhance sensitivity to CPV. We show that there exist regions of phase space on which sensitivity to CPV is of order unity. As a result, the statistical sensitivity of these cuts are verified numerically, using dedicated Monte-Carlo simulations.

title: Flavor oscillation from the two-point function
abstract: We present a formalism for the flavor oscillation of unstable particles that relies only upon the structure of the time Fourier-transformed two-point Green's function. We derive exact oscillation probability and integrated oscillation probability formulae, and verify that our results reproduce the known results for both neutrino and neutral meson oscillation in the expected regimes of parameter space. The generality of our approach permits us to investigate flavor oscillation in exotic parameter regimes, and present the corresponding oscillation formulae.

title: More flavor SU(3) tests for new physics in CP violating B decays
abstract: A bstractThe recent LHCb measurements of the Bs → K−π+ and Bs → K+K− rates and CP asymmetries are in agreement with U-spin expectations from Bd → K+π− and Bd → π+π− results. We derive the complete set of isospin, U-spin, and SU(3) relations among the CP asymmetries in two-body charmless B → PP and B → PV decays, some of which are novel. To go beyond the unbroken SU(3) limit, we present relations which are properly defined and normalized to allow incorporation of SU(3) breaking in the simplest manner. We show that there are no CP relations beyond first order in SU(3) and isospin breaking. We also consider the corresponding relations for charm decays. Comparing parametrizations of the leading order sum rules with data can shed light on the applicability and limitations of both the flavor symmetry and factorization-based descriptions of SU(3) breaking. Two factorization relations can already be tested, and we show they agree with current data.