Karol Hennessy wins a 2024 LHCb Technical award
Well-deserved congratulations to Karol, who has been awarded one of this year’s LHCb Technical awards in recognition of his outstanding track record of contributions to detector R&D, construction, commissioning and operations over more than a decade.
Karol has made major contributions to three generations of the Vertex Locator, or VELO, LHCb’s main tracking detector, The first VELO detector took data during Runs 1 and 2. Karol helped develop the VELO control system and closing procedure (the detector closes to within 7 mm of the beam during data taking), and became the data acquisition expert. He also played a major role in the assembly and testing of the second VELO detector, built as a spare to the first and which is now on display at the LHCb experimental site.
The third VELO detector was installed for Run 3. This new detector uses pixels and is intended to operate at higher data rates and intensities than previously. Karol built and led a team to deliver the (very) challenging data acquisition system for this detector which is read out at 40 MHz. This demanded the creation of an infrastructure that could efficiently and quickly process the data, from reading it out of the sensors to developing the FPGA code for clustering and time ordering. Karol managed the team and made major contributions to code development and commissioning. Thanks to Karol, the VELO is operating at nominal luminosity – laying the foundation for the entire LHCb physics programme for Runs 3 and 4.