Scientists and technicians at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, commonly known by its French acronym CERN (Centre Europ'een pour la Recherche Nucl'eaire), have completed the installation of the largest semiconductor silicon detector.
About the same size as a singles tennis court, the 205m^2 detector is patterned to provide a total of 10 million individual sensing strips, each of which is read out by one of 80 000 custom-designed micro-electronics chips. Data is then transported via 40 000 optical fibres into the Compact Muon Spectrometer (CMS) data acquisition system.
The detector forms part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that will become operational at CERN by mid-year. The project includes South African participation, although this is currently limited to helping develop the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid to analyse the mass of data the LHC will produce.
CERN LHC project manager Peter Sharp says the "complete system will produce data at a higher rate than the entire global telephone system".
The silicon sensors are precision mounted onto 15 200 modules that are in turn mounted onto a very low-mass carbon fibre structure, Sharp says. It maintains the position of the sensors to less than the diameter of a human hair, about 100 microns.
"Each of the charged particles produced in LHC particle collisions at the heart of the CMS detector will be tracked with a precision of better than 20 microns," adds Sharp.
"Constructing a scientific instrument of this size and complexity, designed to operate at the LHC without intervention for more than 10 years, is a major engineering and scientific achievement," adds CMS spokesman Tejinder Virdee. "More than five hundred scientists and engineers from 51 research institutions worldwide have contributed to the success of the project."
With the installation of the detectors approaching its conclusion, attention is turning towards physics analysis, including testing of the full data chain from the detectors through the grid to data storage.
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