We present results of a toy model study of performance of the Time-of-Flight detectors integrated into forward proton detectors. The goal of the ToF device is to suppress effects of additional soft processes (so called pile-up) accompanying the hard-scale central diffractive event, characterized by two tagged leading protons, one on each side from the interaction point. The method of mitigation of the pile-up effects exemplified in this study is based on measuring a difference between arrival times of these leading protons at the forward proton detectors and hence estimate the z-coordinate of the production vertex. We evaluate effects of the the pile-up background by studying in detail its components, and estimate the performance of the ToF method as a function of the time and spatial resolution of the ToF device and of the number of pile-up interactions per bunch crossing. We also propose a new observable with a potential to efficiently separate central diffractive signal from the harsh pile-up environment.
@article{arxiv.2010.00237,
title = {Performance studies of Time-of-Flight detectors at LHC},
author = {Karel Černý and Marek Taševský and Tomáš Sýkora and Radek Žlebčík},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.00237},
year = {2021}
}