Building a state-of-the-art particle detector requires several steps. When you’ve decided what you want to measure, you have to decide which is the best, fastest and most reliable technology to make these measurements. When you’ve shown that your chosen technology can actually measure things to the specific requirements, you have to show that you can […]
Strip teaser
Technological prototype of scintillator-strip calorimeter in its first test beam
A team of two scientists and four students from Shinshu University of Japan and Kyungpook National University of Korea have just packed up their cables, laptops and scintillator strips and left a test beam at DESY with many interesting results in their luggage. They tested the scintillator-strip-based electromagnetic calorimeter (ScECAL), one of the potential layers […]
Getting it all straight
Linear collider detector experts get it straight – a vision of the XFEL tunnel that is. CLIC detector engineers from CERN visited DESY last week to discuss detector challenges such as earthquake stability, alignment, assembly planning and the construction of the detector’s magnet yoke with their colleagues from the ILC’s ILD detector. They also visited […]
Alea iacta est – the die has been cast
The update of the European strategy process for particle physics
This February, the CERN Council initiated the process to review the implementation of the 2006 European Strategy for particle physics. For that purpose a specific European Strategy Group was created with the aim of establishing a proposal for an update of the medium- and long-term European Strategy for Particle Physics. Tatsuya Nakada chaired this group. […]
If the particles won’t come to the detector…
Experts on detector, machine-detector interface and civil engineering agree on detector hall design
Sometimes big things have to move in the way of small things to find exciting things. The ILC detectors, for example. True to the scientific principle of reproducibility of results, two detectors, ILD and SiD, will one day record what happens when electrons and positrons collide so that one can verify (or not) what the […]
Crescendo for European infrastructures
Looking back on the first year of AIDA
Proposed projects rely heavily on active R&D activities, young people willing to spend weeks in test beams, industry willing to tackle new technological challenges and infrastructures that will in the end help turn a few of the proposed projects into reality. The EU-programme AIDA (for Advanced European Infrastructures for Detectors at Accelerators) combines all these […]
From Symmetry Breaking: Scientists put detectors to the test, a few particles at a time
At the Fermilab Test Beam Facility, scientists from around the world line up to test new detector technologies that will help shape the future of particle physics. Whether experimenters need a few pions or lots of protons, the FTBF can deliver: It offers the only high-energy hadron test beam in the United States. It is […]
The incredible shrinking pixel sensor
Inside your pocket-sized mobile device, there likely sits a Lego-brick-sized camera inside of which lies a thumbnail-sized sensor. The sensor, sliver though it is, is on its way to being smaller. ILC researchers have been developing more compact pixel sensors, similar to those in cell-phone cameras, for detecting particle showers. The sensor’s diminished size is […]
The science of showers
PhD student Christian Soldner studies time, tungsten and scintillators
Good 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. […]
Detector R&D “coopetition” between ILC and CLIC
In a recent seminar by the CERN Director of Research and Computing, Sergio Bertolucci, I heard for the first time the word “coopetition”. To my knowledge, it is an invented word that doesn’t yet exist in the English dictionary. He used it to illustrate the type of collaboration that is currently performed by the LHC […]