The diamond time of flight detector of the TOTEM experiment

This contribution describes the design and the performance of a novel timing detector developed by the TOTEM Collaboration. The detector will be installed inside the TOTEM Roman Pots (RPs) and will measure the Time-Of-Flight (TOF) of the protons produced in the central diffractive (CD) interactions at the LHC. In particular, the measurement of the proton TOF allows the determination of the vertex longitudinal position where the protons are produced, thus allowing the protons association with one of the vertices reconstructed by the CMS detectors. The TOF detector is based on single crystal CVD (scCVD) diamond plates and it is designed in order to measure the protons TOF with 50 ps time resolution. To achieve this performance, a dedicated fast and low noise electronics for the signal amplification has been developed. Indeed, while diamond sensors have lower noise and faster signals than silicon sensors, the amount of charge released in the medium is lower. The digitization of the diamond signal is performed sampling the waveform at 10 GSa/s with the SAMPIC chip. The performance of the first TOF detector installed in the LHC in November 2015 will be reported. An overview of the clock distribution system and of the control system which interfaces the timing detectors to the experiment DAQ is finally given.