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A close shave
Blue light emitted by a piece of plastic scintillator. Image: Frank Simon. |
A 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.
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-- Barbara Warmbein / Frank Simon |
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Quantum-beam symposium - communicating the significance of the research
The conference room for the quantum-beam symposium packed with about 100 attendees. Image: Nobuko Kobayashi |
The word quantum beam, or Ryo-shi beam in Japanese, defined as high-quality beams produced with accelerated leptons or hadrons applying quantum mechanics, isn't really an academic word, but rather a key word for advanced technology. But it is gradually getting its recognition in Japan as a technology that will achieve breakthroughs in many fields, such as new materials developments, nanofabrication, or medical applications.
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-- Rika Takahashi |
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From The Beacon-news
8 March 2010
From energy to intensity
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From The Associated Press
8 March 2010
Geneva Atom Smasher Seeks Dark Matter Discoveries
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From CERN
4 March 2010
CERN to celebrate International Women's day
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From The Chronicle
4 March 2010
Canada's New Budget Holds Small Gains for Research
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From Brookhaven National Laboratory
4 March 2010
Exotic Antimatter Detected at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)
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From Nature Blog
4 March 2010
Could radical surgery save UK physics funding agency?
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FALC meets in Mumbai
A team from India at the CERN LHC magnet test facility. Image: CERN
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The most recent meeting of the Funding Agencies for Large Colliders (FALC) was held at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, India from 17 to 18 January. FALC reviewed the major high-energy programmes worldwide during this meeting, as well as hearing reports on the status and plans for the International Linear Collider, the only project presently considered to be "global" and therefore under the special purview of FALC. Highlights from the meeting also included a report from our host Atul Gurtu of TIFR on "Current HEP Activities in India."
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-- Barry Barish
Director's Corner Archive |
arXiv preprints
1003.1394
CALICE Report to the Calorimeter R&D Review Panel
1003.1333
Precision measurement of Higgs decay branching ratios to bottom quarks and gluons at the ILC
1001.4665
Uniformity Studies of Scintillator Tiles directly coupled to SiPMs for Imaging Calorimetry
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