Barbara Warmbein | 16 October 2014Test beam season has started again. Two potential prototypes for future ILC detectors are being tested in a beamline at CERN that delivers hadrons from the proton synchrotron, CERN’s workhorse accelerator. The CALICE collaboration is looking forward to getting its hands on the fresh test beam data.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: CALICE, CERN, CLIC, detector R&D, ILD, test beam
Barbara Warmbein | 18 April 2013A concept to save space and power for future particle detectors called power pulsing has recently been tested and proven to work on one of the possible calorimeter options for the future ILC detectors. The silicon-tungsten electromagnetic calorimeter prototype took data in test beam and magnet at the German lab DESY. The project is currently run by groups from France and Japan.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: CALICE, DESY, detector R&D, electromagnetic calorimeter, France, Japan, power pulsing, test beam
Images: IPNL | 17 May 2012For the first time, a large-scale calorimeter prototype for the ILC, fully equipped with embedded power-pulsed electronics, successfully passed a test beam at CERN a few weeks ago. A prototype of more than one cubic metre in size of CALICE’s Semi-Digital Hadronic Calorimeter successfully recorded and tracked 1 million particles from CERN’s SPS accelerator beam (muons and pions). Thanks to power pulsing, the detector front-end electronics was periodically disabled and enabled, following the beam cycle. Read more and view more photos about the test beam.
Category: Image of the week | Tagged: CALICE, calorimeter, power pulsing, sdhcal, test beam
Barbara Warmbein | 12 January 2012Good timing is a virtue. Just as comedians have to wait for just the right moment to deliver their punch line, linear collider physicists need to know when to make cuts. These cuts separate phenomena called particle showers from each other, making it possible for the physicists to tell which reaction originated from which collision. Two German PhD students have built a test device that is supposed to get behind the precise timing of showers.
Category: Profile | Tagged: CALICE, calorimeter, detector R&D, IEEE, ILC-CLIC collaboration
Leah Hesla | 15 September 2011Resolved that pictures of particle jets don’t have to be fuzzy or gnarled, scientists developed the particle flow algorithm, a paradigm for effectively teasing out each particle’s energy from another’s. To make it work, researchers expanded the tracking capabilities of the detector model, enabling it to measure energies with higher precision.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, calorimetry R&D, detector R&D, particle flow algorithm
Leah Hesla | 12 May 2011The Digital Hadron Calorimeter offers high-resolution images of particle showers. With the help of hundreds of thousands of readout pads, tiny pieces of each charged particle’s path within hadronic showers are recorded. The DHCAL brings scientists not only detailed images, but now also complete ones, having expanded its potential in recent months by tens of thousands of additional readout channels.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, DHCAL
2 December 2010The "What is it?" image of last week's ILC NewsLine is a picture-perfect example of why we now often call the calorimeter prototypes for the ILC "imaging calorimeters". To start with the solution, if you quickly want to know if you got it right: The picture shows three different types of particles in the CALICE tungsten hadron calorimeter prototype. From left to right, they are an electron, a muon and a pion. The images come from the recent test beam at CERN.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, event display
Barbara Warmbein | 9 September 2010In a hall for test beam experiments at CERN, next to the CLOUD climate experiment and an irradiation facility, sits a detector prototype that is in many ways a first. It's the first ever hadronic sandwich calorimeter (HCal) prototype made of tungsten. It's the first prototype for a detector for the Compact Linear Collider Study CLIC, developed by the linear collider detector R&D group (LCD group) at CERN. And it's the first piece of hardware that results directly from the cooperation between CLIC and ILC detector study groups. Now its makers are keen to see first particle showers in their detector.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, CERN, CLIC, detector R&D, hadronic calorimeter, HCal, tungsten calorimeter
Barbara Warmbein | 11 March 2010A team from the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich just found scientific evidence for the old saying that less is more. By shaving off a piece of scintillating tile, they achieved test results that were considerably better than tests with a tile that was complete. The trick: stick a silicon photomultiplier into the shaved-off groove, rather than just on the outside of the tile. “After quite a few iterations, we came up with a shape for the plastic tile that works extremely well. It also now includes a SiPM that is embedded into the tile, which is important for a realistic calorimeter since then the individual cells can be placed edge on edge, without any gaps between them,” explains the team leader Frank Simon. Frank Simon is also an active blogger on Quantum Diaries, and one of his most recent entries features an explanation of tiles, fibres and photomultipliers and how they came up with the idea of reshaping the tile.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, scintillator, SiPM
Barbara Warmbein | 25 February 2010Sometimes detector projects that are still at a planning stage can tell detector projects that are already taking data what hardware to use. This is certainly the case when the R&D project has been using, trying and testing a technology that the 'old hand' is considering for its upgrade: a relatively new type of sensor called Silicon Photo Multiplier, or SiPM, developed in Russia. A meeting brought experts from all areas that use SiPMs together at DESY in Hamburg, Germany, for two days earlier this week.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: CALICE, DESY, HCal, Silicon Photo Multiplier, SiPM
