CALICE's Semi-Digital Hadronic Calorimeter prototype during April 2012 test beam at CERN. Image: IPNL
For 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). It was equipped with 48 chambers of glass resistive plate chambers (GRPC) and two Micro Mesh gaseous structure (MICROMEGAS). This module is pretty close to what a future ILC hadronic calorimeter could look like, totalling 460 000 electronic channels. Thanks to power pulsing, the detector front-end electronics was intermittently disabled and enabled, following the beam cycle. The SDHCAL team involved in the construction and test of this module are based in France (IPNL in Lyon, LAPP in Annecy, LAL in Orsay and LLR in Palaiseau), Spain (CIEMAT in Madrid) and the universities of Louvain and Ghent in Belgium.
Lowering power is key to reduce the detectors’ power budget of course, but also to reduce heat dissipation in the sub-detectors. It is also a key issue for particle physicists to solve to design the next generation of collider experiments.
Learn more about power pulsing in ILC NewsLine
100-GeV particle tracks recorded in CALICE's Semi-Digital Hadronic Calorimeter prototype during the April 2012 test beam at CERN. Image: IPNL
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