Particle detectors are expected to detect a lot of signal and very little background noise so that scientists can see what went on in their detector without being distracted by irrelevant signals. The technological prototype of the silicon-tungsten (SiW) electromagnetic calorimeter passed its first test in summer 2012 with flying colours with a signal to noise […]
Good signal, little noise
Power-pulsing tests on the SiW electromagnetic calorimeter yield promising results
An eye on the pulse
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 […]
Quite attrack-tive
Tracks show the paths of particles passing through the time projection chamber, the tracker prototype for the ILD detector, in a DESY test beam last week. Six brand-new readout modules of the Micromegas type – one possible module type for the final detector – were mounted to the TPC endplate and produced beautiful tracks both […]
Large-scale powering scheme has scientists’ pulses racing
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 […]
Checkout of ATF starts with test beam
On the evening of 26 May 2011, KEK scientists and engineers confirmed that a test beam successfully steered through the linac during the commissioning test of the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF). “It went relatively smoothly, reached the end of linac in a half-hour or so,” said Nobuhiro Terunuma of KEK, Japan, the new spokesperson for […]
TPC in the right light
Finding the nano-size beam
The International Linear Collider (ILC) interaction region beam sizes and component position stability requirements will be as small as a few nanometers. Making a head-on collision with a few nanometers beams, each beam travelling across some 20 km in the linear accelerator, is a bit like colliding two baseballs — one thrown from earth and […]