The ATLAS detector is installed in its experimental cavern at Point 1 of the CERN Large Hadron Collider. During Run 2 of the LHC, a luminosity of ℒ = 2 × 10³⁴ cm^-2 s^-1 was routinely achieved at the start of fills, twice the design luminosity. For Run 3, accelerator improvements, notably luminosity levelling, allow sustained running at an instantaneous luminosity of ℒ = 2 × 10³⁴ cm^-2 s^-1, with an average of up to 60 interactions per bunch crossing. The ATLAS detector has been upgraded to recover Run 1 single-lepton trigger thresholds while operating comfortably under Run 3 sustained pileup conditions. A fourth pixel layer 3.3 cm from the beam axis was added before Run 2 to improve vertex reconstruction and b-tagging performance. New Liquid Argon Calorimeter digital trigger electronics, with corresponding upgrades to the Trigger and Data Acquisition system, take advantage of a factor of 10 finer granularity to improve triggering on electrons, photons, taus, and hadronic signatures through increased pileup rejection. The inner muon endcap wheels were replaced by New Small Wheels with Micromegas and small-strip Thin Gap Chamber detectors, providing both precision tracking and Level-1 Muon trigger functionality. Trigger coverage of the inner barrel muon layer near one endcap region was augmented with modules integrating new thin-gap resistive plate chambers and smaller-diameter drift-tube chambers. Tile Calorimeter scintillation counters were added to improve electron energy resolution and background rejection. Upgrades to Minimum Bias Trigger Scintillators and Forward Detectors improve luminosity monitoring and enable total proton-proton cross section, diffractive physics, and heavy ion measurements. These upgrades are all compatible with operation in the much harsher environment anticipated after the High-Luminosity upgrade of the LHC and are the first steps towards preparing ATLAS for the High-Luminosity upgrade of the LHC. This paper describes the Run 3 configuration of the ATLAS detector.

The combination of responsive microgels and Lab-on-Fiber devices represents a valuable technological tool for developing advanced optrodes, especially useful for biomedical applications. Recently, we have reported on a fabrication method, based on the dip coating technique, for creating a microgels monolayer in a controlled fashion onto the fiber tip. In the wake of these results, with a view towards industrial applications, here we carefully analyze, by means of both morphological and optical characterizations, the effect of each fabrication step (fiber dipping, rinsing, and drying) on the microgels film properties. Interestingly, we demonstrate that it is possible to significantly reduce the duration (from 960 min to 31 min) and the complexity of the fabrication procedure, without compromising the quality of the microgels film at all. Repeatability studies are carried out to confirm the validity of the optimized deposition procedure. Moreover, the new procedure is successfully applied to different kinds of substrates (patterned gold and bare optical fiber glass), demonstrating the generality of our findings. Overall, the results presented in this work offer the possibility to improve of a factor ~30 the fabrication throughput of microgels-assisted optical fiber probes, thus enabling their possible exploitation in industrial applications.

Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) based on coherent reflectometry with chirped pulses (CP-ϕOTDR) is a recent, yet widely recognized technique in providing spatially-resolved distributed measurements of certain physical quantities over the length of an optical fiber. Any given perturbation along the cable can be retrieved as a local temporal shift of the backscattered optical power trace, and recovered using sequential trace-to-trace correlations. However, as a technique that relies on a General Cross-correlation (GCC) estimation function, it displays a non-zero probability of obtaining anomalous estimations, which can fundamentally limit the long-term performance. Furthermore, some demonstrated strategies proposed to mitigate this effect can directly lead to the emergence of cumulative errors, which become as critical as the measurement time increases. Here, we analyze the errors affecting the long-term stability in CP-ϕOTDR systems, and we propose several strategies and processing methods to mitigate their effect. We demonstrate a ∼3 mK error after a one-month continuous temperature experiment performed to a SMF, reaching unprecedented temperature stability in CP-ϕOTDR systems with important implications in emerging fields such as DAS seismology or oceanography.

We present the main steps of FOS (based on LPG and FBG) installation in the CERN-ATLAS experiment for temperature and humidity measurements, from laboratory calibrations and data acquisition chain development, to their installation and operation.