A. S. W. Abdelmotteleb, M. Adinolfi, M. Armour, T. Blake, T. Conneely, D. Cussans, A. Davidson, S. Dekkers, R. Dzhygadlo, U. Egede, T.C. Fearon, C. Frei, R. Forty, R. Gao, T. Gershon, T. Gys, T. Hadavizadeh, G. Hallett, N. Harnew, D. Hu, K. Jewkes, M. Kreps, J. Lapington, M. Lehuraux, P. -R. Li, J. B. Liu, A. Lowe, M. Loutit, T. Ma, I. Mackay, S. Malde, S. Mao, A. Markfort, J. Milnes, A. Mitra, R. Pestotnik, D. Piedigrossi, I. Polyakov, W. B. Qian, R. Rabadan, J. H. Rademacker, G. Schepers, J. Schwiening, M. Shao, T. Slater, S. Stanislaus, E. J. Walton, N. W. Wang, Y. L. Wang, B. D. C. Westhenry, G. Wilkinson, A. York, L. X. Zhu
The TORCH time-of-flight detector is part of a proposed upgrade of the LHCb experiment, foreseen for the high-luminosity phase of the LHC. The TORCH detector provides particle identification of hadrons in the sub-10 GeV/c momentum range, exploiting the prompt production of Cherenkov photons in an array of fused-silica plates. Photons are propagated to the periphery of the detector via total internal reflection, where they are focused by a cylindrical mirror onto an array of fast-timing MCP-PMT photon detectors. In order to achieve the design goals of TORCH, individual photons must be timed to 70 ps precision or better. The development of the MCP-PMTs, the mechanical design and assembly strategy of a full-scale TORCH detector module, plus its system-level validation in a test beam are described. A validation of timing references, the optical integrity across glue joints and the readout integration are presented.