We performed a detailed study of the timing performance of the LHCb VELO Timepix3 Telescope with a 180 GeV/c mixed hadron beam at the CERN SPS. A twofold method was developed to improve the resolution of single-plane time measurements, resulting in a more precise overall track time measurement. The first step uses spatial information of reconstructed tracks in combination with the measured signal charge in the sensor to correct for a mixture of different effects: variations in charge carrier drift time; variations in signal induction, which are the result of a non-uniform weighting field in the pixels; and lastly, timewalk in the analog front-end. The second step corrects for systematic timing offsets in Timepix3 that vary from -2 ns to 2 ns. By applying this method, we improved the track time resolution from 438±16 ps to 276±4 ps.
@article{arxiv.2008.04801,
title = {Timing performance of the LHCb VELO Timepix3 Telescope},
author = {K. Heijhoff and K. Akiba and M. van Beuzekom and P. Bosch and J. Buytaert and M. Campbell and A. P. Colijn and P. Collins and E. Dall'Occo and T. Evans and R. Geertsema and M. L. E. Heidotting and D. Hynds and X. Llopart Cudie and H. Schindler and H. Snoek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.04801},
year = {2021}
}