Long-term Operation of the Multi-Wire-Proportional-Chambers of the LHCb Muon System
F. P. Albicocco, L. Anderlini, M. Anelli, F. Archilli, G. Auriemma, W. Baldini, G. Bencivenni, N. Bondar, B. Bochin, D. Brundu, S. Cadeddu, P. Campana, G. Carbo… 展开作者
F. P. Albicocco, L. Anderlini, M. Anelli, F. Archilli, G. Auriemma, W. Baldini, G. Bencivenni, N. Bondar, B. Bochin, D. Brundu, S. Cadeddu, P. Campana, G. Carboni, A. Cardini, M. Carletti, L. Casu, A. Chubykin, P. Ciambrone, E. Dané, P. De Simone, M. Fontana, P. Fresch, M. Gatta, G. Gavrilov, S. Gets, G. Graziani, A. Kashchuk, M. Korolev, S. Kotriakhova, E. Kuznetsova, A. Lai, O. Levitskaya, A. Lai, O. Maev, D. Maysuzenko, G. Martellotti, S. Nasybulin, P. Neustroev, R. G. C. Oldeman, M. Palutan, G. Passaleva, G. Penso, D. Pinci, R. Santacesaria, M. Santimaria, E. Santovetti, B. Saitta, A. Saputi, A. Sarti, C. Satriano, A. Satta, B. Schmidt, T. Schneider, B. Sciascia, A. Sciubba, R. Vazquez-Gomez, S. Vecchi, A. Vorobyev
The muon detector of LHCb, which comprises 1368 multi-wire-proportional-chambers (MWPC) for a total area of 435 m2, is the largest instrument of its kind exposed to such a high-radiation environment. In nine years of operation, from 2010 until 2018, we did not observe appreciable signs of ageing of the detector in terms of reduced performance. However, during such a long period, many chamber gas gaps suffered from HV trips. Most of the trips were due to Malter-like effects, characterised by the appearance of local self-sustained high currents, presumably originating from impurities induced during chamber production. Very effective, though long, recovery procedures were implemented with a HV training of the gaps in situ while taking data. The training allowed most of the affected chambers to be returned to their full functionality and the muon detector efficiency to be kept close to 100%. The possibility of making the recovery faster and even more effective by adding a small percentage of oxygen in the gas mixture has been studied and successfully tested.
The MUON Detector (MD) of LHCb is one of the largest instruments of this kind worldwide, and one of the most irradiated. It has performed exceptionally well during the RUN1 and RUN2 of the LHC at an instantaneous luminosity of 4$\times$10$^{32}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$, with tracking inefficiencies at the level of 1$\%$ and 2.6$\%$, respectively. Looking forward for the future LHCb Upgrade 2 (U2) planned in 2031 and aiming in running the detector at increased luminosity by a factor $\sim$50, and at the same time keeping a very high ($\sim$99$\%$) detection efficiency, an option with reuse significan…
The preliminary results of an aging test performed at the CERN Gamma Irradiation Facility on a single--gap RPC prototype developed for the LHCb Muon System are presented. The results are based on an accumulated charge density of 0.42 C/cm^2, corresponding to about 4 years of LHCb running at the highest background rate. We observe a rise in the dark current and noise measured with source off. The current drawn with source on steadily decreased, possibly indicating an increase of resistivity of the chamber plates. The performance of the chamber, studied with a muon beam under several photon flux…
Recent results of an aging test performed at the CERN Gamma Irradiation Facility on a single--gap RPC prototype developed for the LHCb Muon System are presented. The results are based on an accumulated charge of about 0.45 C/cm$^2$, corresponding to about 4 years of LHCb running at the highest background rate. The performance of the chamber has been studied under several photon flux values exploiting a muon beam. A degradation of the rate capability above 1 kHz/cm$^2$ is observed, which can be correlated to a sizeable increase of resistivity of the chamber plates. An increase of the chamber da…
We present a novel electrical technique to measure the tension of wires in multi-wire drift chambers. We create alternating electric fields by biasing adjacent wires on both sides of a test wire with a superposition of positive and negative DC voltages on an AC signal ($V_{\rm AC} \pm V_{\rm DC}$). The resulting oscillations of the wire will display a resonance at its natural frequency, and the corresponding change of the capacitance will lead to a measurable current. This scheme is scalable to multiple wires and therefore enables us to precisely measure the tension of a large number of wires …
In this paper we describe how the readout planes for the MicroBooNE Time Projection Chamber were constructed, assembled and installed. We present the individual wire preparation using semi-automatic winding machines and the assembly of wire carrier boards. The details of the wire installation on the detector frame and the tensioning of the wires are given. A strict quality assurance plan ensured the integrity of the readout planes. The different tests performed at all stages of construction and installation provided crucial information to achieve the successful realisation of the MicroBooNE wi…
Plastic gas pipes are widely used in experimental setups for gaseous detectors, due to their flexibility and easiness of use. This report describes the characterization studies realized on the use of plastic gas pipes, particularly in relation to the accumulation of impurities in gas systems that they may cause. A laboratory setup has been implemented to evaluate the possible effects caused by plastic pipes, in terms of their specific impact on O2 and H2O accumulation and the consequences on detectors performance. As Single Wire Proportional Chambers are very sensitive to the presence of pollu…
Precision drift tube chambers with a sense wire positioning accuracy of better than 20 microns are under construction for the ATLAS muon spectrometer. 70% of the 88 large chambers for the outermost layer of the central part of the spectrometer have been assembled. Measurements during chamber construction of the positions of the sense wires and of the sensors for the optical alignment monitoring system demonstrate that the requirements for the mechanical precision of the chambers are fulfilled.
The gas gain of single-wire chambers filled with isobutane, with cell cross-section 12x12 mm and wire diameters of 15, 25, 50 and 100 $μ$m, has been measured at pressures ranging 12-92 Torr. Contrary to the experience at atmospheric pressure, at very low pressures the gas gain on thick wires is higher than that on thin wires at the same applied high voltage as was recently shown. Bigger wire diameters should be used in wire chambers operating at very low pressure if multiple scattering on wires is not an issue.
Gaseous detectors with sense wires are still in use today in small experiments as well as modern ones as those at the LHC. This short note is about the construction of a small wire chamber with limited resources, which could be used both as an educational tool and also as a tracker in small experiments. The particular detector type selected for this work is the so called "Delay Wire Chamber": it has only two output channels per plane and can be made fully gas tight for educational operations. The design can be made with free software tools, and the construction can be achieved by relatively si…
We propose an analysis of the dead time losses in counting imaging detectors such as MWPC which can resolve $k$ simultaneous hits, and analyze in more detail an $X-Y$ detector which has a third wire set which allows for the recognition of simultaneous impacts.
Detectors in particle physics, particularly when including cryogenic components, are often enclosed in vessels that do not provide any physical or visual access to the detectors themselves after installation. However, it can be desirable for experiments to visually investigate the inside of the vessel. The MicroBooNE cryostat hosts a TPC with sense-wire planes, which had to be inspected for damage such as breakage or sagging. This paper describes an approach to view the inside of the MicroBooNE cryostat with a setup of a camera and a mirror through one of its cryogenic service nozzles. The pap…
For the upgrade of the ATLAS muon spectrometer in March 2014 new muon tracking chambers (sMDT) with drift-tubes of 15 mm diameter, half of the value of the standard ATLAS Monitored Drift-Tubes (MDT) chambers, and 10~$μ$m positioning accuracy of the sense wires have been constructed. The new chambers are designed to be fully compatible with the present ATLAS services but, with respect to the previously installed ATLAS MDT chambers, they are assembled in a more compact geometry and they deploy two additional tube layers that provide redundant rack information. The chambers are composed of 8 laye…
Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) chambers will constitute the large majority of precision detectors in the Muon Spectrometer of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. For commissioning and calibration of MDT chambers, a Cosmic Ray Measurement Facility is in operation at Munich University. The objectives of this facility are to test the chambers and on-chamber electronics, to map the positions of the anode wires within the chambers with the precision needed for standalone muon momentum measurement in ATLAS, and to gain experience in the operation of the chambers and on-line calibr…
The Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) chambers for the muon spectrometer of the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) consist of 3-4 layers of pressurised drift tubes on either side of a space frame carrying an optical deformation monitoring system. The chambers have to provide a track position resolution of 40 microns with a single-tube resolution of at least 80 microns and a sense wire positioning accu- racy of 20 ?microns (rms). The feasibility was demonstrated with the full-scale prototype of one of the largest MDT chambers with 432 drift tubes of 3.8 m length. For the ATLAS muon spec…
Systematic measurements on the rate capability of thin MWPCs operated in Xenon, Argon and Neon mixtures using CO2 as UV-quencher are presented. A good agreement between data and existing models has been found, allowing us to present the rate capability of MWPCs in a comprehensive way and ultimately connect it with the mobilities of the drifting ions.
Gated wires are widely used in Time Projection Chamber (TPC) to avoid ion back-flow (IBF) in the drift volume. The anode wires can provide stable gain at high voltage with a long lifetime. However, switching on and off the gated grid (GG) leads to a dead time and also limit the readout efficiency of the TPC. Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) foil provides a possibility of continuous readout for TPC, which can suppress IBF efficiently while keeping stable gain. A prototype chamber including two layers of GEM foils and anode wires has been built to combine both advantages from GEM and anode wire. Us…
The ultra-low mass cylindrical drift chamber designed for the MEG II experiment is a challenging apparatus made of 1728 phi = 20 micron gold plated tungsten sense wires, 7680 phi = 40 micron and 2496 phi = 50 micron silver plated aluminum field wires. Because of electrostatic stability requirements all the wires have to be stretched at mechanical tensions of about 25, 19 and 29 g respectively which must be controlled at a level better than 0.5 g. This chamber is presently in acquisition, but during its construction about 100 field wires broke, because of chemical corrosion induced by the atmos…
The MEG experiment at the Paul Scherrer Institut searches for the charged-Lepton-Flavor-Violating mu+ -> e+ gamma decay. MEG has already set the world best upper limit on the branching ratio: BR<4.2x10^-13 @ 90% C.l. An upgrade (MEG II) of the whole detector has been approved to obtain a substantial increase of sensitivity. Currently MEG II is completing the upgrade of the various detectors, an engineering run and a pre-commissioning run were carried out during 2018 and 2019. The new positron tracker is a unique volume, ultra-light He based cylindrical drift chamber (CDCH), with high granulari…
The performance of a small prototype of a cylindrical drift chamber (CDC) used in the COMET Phase-I experiment was studied by using an electron beam. The prototype chamber was constructed with alternating all-stereo wire configuration and operated with the He-iC$_{4}$H$_{10}$ (90/10) gas mixture without a magnetic field. The drift space-time relation, drift velocity, d$E$/d$x$ resolution, hit efficiency, and spatial resolution as a function of distance from the wire were investigated. The average spatial resolution of 150 $μ$m with the hit efficiency of 99% was obtained at applied voltages hig…
The calorimeter and muon systems are essential components to provide a trigger for the LHCb experiment. The calorimeter system comprises a scintillating pad detector and pre-shower, followed by electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters. The calorimeter system allows photons, electrons and hadrons to be identified, and their energy to be measured. The muon system consists of five measuring stations equipped with Multi-Wire Proportional Chambers (MWPCs) and triple-Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) detectors, separated by iron filters. It allows the muons identification and transverse momentum measur…
The LHCb Muon system performance is presented using cosmic ray events collected in 2009. These events allowed to test and optimize the detector configuration before the LHC start. The space and time alignment and the measurement of chamber efficiency, time resolution and cluster size are described in detail. The results are in agreement with the expected detector performance.
Ultra-thin metallic anodic and cathodic wires are frequently employed in low-mass gaseous detectors for precision experiments, where the amount of material crossed by charged particles must be minimised. We present here the results of an analysis of the mechanical stress and chemical corrosion effects observed in $40$ and $50~{\rm{μm}}$ diameter silver plated aluminum wires mounted within the volume of the MEG\,II drift chamber, which caused the breaking of about one hundred wires (over a total of $\approx 12000$). This analysis is based on the accurate inspection of the broken wires by means …
In this paper we explore the potential improvements in neutrino event reconstruction that a 3D pixelated readout could offer over a 2D projective wire readout for liquid argon time projection chambers. We simulate and study events in two generic, idealized detector configurations for these two designs, classifying events in each sample with deep convolutional neural networks to compare the best 2D results to the best 3D results. In almost all cases we find that the 3D readout provides better reconstruction efficiency and purity than the 2D projective wire readout, with the advantages of 3D bei…
The performance of the muon identification in LHCb is extracted from data using muons and hadrons produced in J/ψ->μμ, Λ->pπand D^{\star}->πD0(Kπ) decays. The muon identification procedure is based on the pattern of hits in the muon chambers. A momentum dependent binary requirement is used to reduce the probability of hadrons to be misidentified as muons to the level of 1%, keeping the muon efficiency in the range of 95-98%. As further refinement, a likelihood is built for the muon and non-muon hypotheses. Adding a requirement on this likelihood that provides a total muon efficiency at the lev…
Data sets with high statistics taken at the cosmic ray facility, equipped with 3 ATLAS BOS MDT chambers, in Garching (Munich) have been used to study temperature and pressure effects on gas gain and drifttime. The deformation of a thermally expanded chamber was reconstructed using the internal RasNik alignment monitoring system and the tracks from cosmic data. For these studies a heating system was designed to increase the temperature of the middle chamber by up to 20 Kelvins over room temperature. For comparison the temperature effects on gas properties have been simulated with Garfield. The …
The MEG-II experiment searches for the lepton flavor violating decay: mu in electron and gamma. The reconstruction of the positron trajectory uses a cylindrical drift chamber operated with a mixture of He and iC4H10 gas. It is important to provide a stable performance of the detector in terms of its electron transport parameters, avalanche multiplication, composition and purity of the gas mixture. In order to have a continuous monitoring of the quality of gas, we plan to install a small drift chamber, with a simple geometry that allows to measure very precisely the electron drift velocity in a…
The Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) is an advanced neutrino detector technology widely used in recent and upcoming accelerator neutrino experiments. It features a low energy threshold and high spatial resolution that allow for comprehensive reconstruction of event topologies. In current-generation LArTPCs, the recorded data consist of digitized waveforms on wires produced by induced signal on wires of drifting ionization electrons, which can also be viewed as two-dimensional (2D) (time versus wire) projection images of charged-particle trajectories. For such an imaging detector, …
Small-diameter Muon Drift Tube (sMDT) chambers have been developed for the ATLAS muon detector upgrade. They possess an improved rate capability and a more compact design with respect to the existing chambers, which allows to equip detector regions uninstrument at present. The chamber assembly methods have been optimized for mass production, while the sense wire positioning accuracy is improved to below ten microns. The chambers will be ready for installation in the winter shutdown 2016/17 of the Large Hadron Collider. The design and construction of the new sMDT chambers for ATLAS will be disc…
A numerical method of determining the wire sag in a multiwire proportional chamber used in RICH (ALICE) by solving the second order differential equation which governs the wire stability has been presented. The three point Finite Difference Method (FDM) has generated a tridiagonal matrix equation relating the deflection of wire segments to the force acting on it. The precise estimates of electrostatic force has been obtained from accurate field computation using a nearly exact Boundary Element Method (neBEM) solver.
The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) is a general-purpose experimental apparatus with an inner tracking detector for measuring charged particles, surrounded by a calorimeter for measurements of electromagnetic and hadronic showers, and a muon detector system. We present a technique for, and results of, a precise relative alignment of the drift chamber wires of the CDF tracker. This alignment has been an important component of the track momentum calibration, which is the basis for the charged-lepton calibration for the measurement of the W boson mass at CDF.
With half the drift-tube diameter of the Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) chambers of the ATLAS muon spectrometer and otherwise unchanged operating parameters, small-diameter Muon Drift Tube (sMDT) chambers provide an order of magnitude higher rate capability and can be installed in detector regions where MDT chambers do not fit. The chamber assembly time has been reduced by a factor of seven to one working day and the sense wire positioning accuracy improved by a factor of two to better than ten microns. Two sMDT chambers have been installed in ATLAS in 2014 to improve the momentum resolution in th…
Wire chambers are routinely operated as tracking detectors in magnetic spectrometers at high-intensity continuous electron beams. Especially in experiments studying reactions with small cross-sections the reaction yield is limited by the background rate in the chambers. One way to determine the track of a charged particle through a multi-wire proportional chamber (MWPC) is the measurement of the charge distribution induced on its cathodes. In practical applications of this read-out method, the algorithm to relate the measured charge distribution to the avalanche position is an important factor…
The Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) chambers for the muon spectrometer of the AT- LAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) consist of 3-4 layers of pressurized drift tubes on either side of a space frame carrying an optical monitoring system to correct for deformations. The full-scale prototype of a large MDT chamber has been constructed with methods suitable for large-scale production. X-ray measurements at CERN showed a positioning accuracy of the sense wires in the chamber of better than the required 20 ?microns (rms). The performance of the chamber was studied in a muon beam at CERN. Cha…
A simple but novel driver system has been developed to operate the wire gating grid of a Time Projection Chamber (TPC). This system connects the wires of the gating grid to its driver via low impedance transmission lines. When the gating grid is open, all wires have the same voltage allowing drift electrons, produced by the ionization of the detector gas molecules, to pass through to the anode wires. When the grid is closed, the wires have alternating higher and lower voltages causing the drift electrons to terminate at the more positive wires. Rapid opening of the gating grid with low pickup …
Thin gap chambers (TGCs) are used for the muon trigger system in the forward region of the LHC experiment ATLAS. A TGC consists of a plane of closely spaced wires maintained at positive high voltage, sandwiched between resistive grounded cathode planes with an anode wire to cathode plane gap distance smaller than the wire-to-wire spacing. The TGCs are expected to provide a trigger signal within 25 ns of the bunch spacing of the LHC accelerator, with an efficiency exceeding 95%, while exposed to an effective photon and neutron background ranging from 30 to 500 Hz/cm2. About 2,500 out of the 3,6…
ATLAS muon detector upgrades aim for increased acceptance for muon triggering and precision tracking and for improved rate capability of the muon chambers in the high-background regions of the detector with increasing LHC luminosity. The small-diameter Muon Drift Tube (sMDT) chambers have been developed for these purposes. With half of the drift-tube diameter of the MDT chambers and otherwise unchanged operating parameters, sMDT chambers share the advantages of the MDTs, but have an order of magnitude higher rate capability and can be installed in detector regions where MDT chambers do not fit…
A set of classical multi-wire proportional chambers were designed and constructed with the main purpose of efficient cosmic muon detection. These detectors are relatively simple to construct, and at the same time are low cost, making them ideal for educational purposes. The detector layers have efficiencies above 99% for minimum ionizing cosmic muons, and their position resolution is about 1 cm, that is, particle trajectories are clearly observable. Visualization of straight tracks is possible using an LED array, with the discriminated and latched signal driving the display. Due to the excepti…
This paper describes the small-diameter monitored drift-tube detector construction at the University of Michigan as a contribution to the ATLAS Muon Spectrometer upgrade for the high-luminosity Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Measurements of the first 30 chambers built at Michigan show that the drift tube wire position accuracy meets the specification of 20 microns. The positions of the platforms for alignment and magnetic field sensors are all installed well within the required precision. The cosmic ray test measurements show single wire tracking resolution of 100 +- 7 microns with an average …
We present the design and performance of a prototype ASIC digitizer for integrated wire chamber readout, implemented in 65 nm commercial CMOS technology. Each channel of the 4-channel prototype is composed of two 16-bit Time-to-Digital Converters (TDCs), one 8-bit Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC), a front-end preamplifier and shaper, plus digital and analog buffers that support a variety of digitization chains. The prototype has a multiplexed digital backend that executes a state machine, distributes control and timing signals, and buffers data for serial output. Laboratory bench tests measur…
Three dimensional field configuration has been simulated for a simple wire chamber consisting of one anode wire stretched along the axis of a grounded square cathode tube by solving numerically the boundary integral equation of the first kind. A closed form expression of potential due to charge distributed over flat rectangular surface has been invoked in the solver using Green's function formalism leading to a nearly exact computation of electrostatic field. The solver has been employed to study the effect of several geometrical attributes such as the aspect ratio ($λ= \frac{l}{d}$, defined a…
New developments in Thin Gap Chambers (TGC) detectors to provide fast trigger and high precision muon tracking under sLHC conditions are presented. The modified detectors are shown to stand a high total irradiation dose equivalent to 6 Coulomb/cm of wire, without showing any deterioration in their performance. Two large (1.2 x 0.8 m^2) prototypes containing four gaps, each gap providing pad, strips and wires readout, with a total thickness of 50 mm, have been constructed. Their local spatial resolution has been measured in a 100 GeV/c muon test beam at CERN. At perpendicular incidence angle, s…
The LHC upgrade scheduled for 2018 is expected to significantly increase the accelerator's luminosity, and as a result the radiation background rates in the ATLAS Muon Spectrometer will increase too. Some of its components will have to be replaced in order to cope with these high rates. Newly designed small-strip Thin Gap chambers (sTGC) will replace them at the small wheel region. One of the differences between the sTGC and the currently used TGC is the alignment of the wires along the azimuthal direction. As a result, the outermost wires approach the detector's edge with a small angle. Such …
The IDEA detector concept for a future e$^{+}$e$^{-}$ collider adopts an ultra-low mass drift chamber as a central tracking system. The He-based ultra-low mass drift chamber is designed to provide efficient tracking, a high-precision momentum measurement, and excellent particle identification by exploiting the cluster counting technique. This paper describes the expected tracking performance, obtained with full and fast simulation, for track reconstruction on detailed simulated physics events. Moreover, the details of the construction parameters of the drift chamber, including the inspection o…
Small-diameter muon drift tube (sMDT) chambers are a cost-effective technology for high-precision muon tracking. The rate capability of the sMDT chambers has been extensively tested at the Gamma Irradiation Facility at CERN in view of expected rates at future high-energy hadron colliders. Results show that it fulfills the requirements over most of the acceptance of muon detectors. The optimization of the read-out electronics to further increase the rate capability of the detectors is discussed. Chambers of this type are under construction for upgrades of the muon spectrometer of the ATLAS dete…
A self quenching streamer (SQS), or limited streamer mode has been studied in single wire chambers with cross-sections 12x12 mm and wire diameters 15, 25 and 50 microns. Chambers were filled with either pure dimethyl ether (DME) or isobutane gases and irradiated with Gd-148 alpha and Fe-55 x-ray sources. Clear transitions from a proportional to 100% SQS mode were observed on all three diameter wires with both gases irradiated with alpha particles. Double SQS discharges due to inclined tracks observed in DME gas allowed an estimation of a streamer size along the wire of less than 1 mm. The seco…
The performance of the LHCb Muon system and its stability across the full 2010 data taking with LHC running at ps = 7 TeV energy is studied. The optimization of the detector setting and the time calibration performed with the first collisions delivered by LHC is described. Particle rates, measured for the wide range of luminosities and beam operation conditions experienced during the run, are compared with the values expected from simulation. The space and time alignment of the detectors, chamber efficiency, time resolution and cluster size are evaluated. The detector performance is found to b…
Noble liquid radiation detectors have long been afflicted by spurious electron emission from their cathodic electrodes. This phenomenon must be understood and mitigated in the next generation of liquid xenon (LXe) experiments searching for WIMP dark matter or neutrinoless double beta decay, and in the large liquid argon (LAr) detectors for the long-baseline neutrino programmes. We present a systematic study of this spurious emission involving a series of slow voltage-ramping tests on fine metal wires immersed in a two-phase xenon time projection chamber with single electron sensitivity. Emissi…
An integrated readout system for parallel-plate avalanche counter and multi-wire drift chamber at HIAF-HIRIBL
Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院近代物理研究所);School of Nuclear Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学核科学与技术学院)
The STAR experiment at RHIC is planning to upgrade the Time Projection Chamber which lies at the heart of the detector. We have designed an instrument to measure the tension of the wires in the multi-wire proportional chambers (MWPCs) which will be used in the TPC upgrade. The wire tension measurement system causes the wires to vibrate and then it measures the fundamental frequency of the oscillation via a laser based optical platform. The platform can scan the entire wire plane, automatically, in a single run and obtain the wire tension on each wire with high precision. In this paper, the det…
Unencapsulated aluminum wedge wire bonds are common in particle physics pixel and strip detectors. Industry-favored bulk encapsulation is eschewed due to the range of operating temperatures and radiation. Wire bond failures are a persistent source of tracking-detector failure. Unencapsulated bonds are vulnerable to condensation-induced corrosion, particularly when halides are present. Oscillations from periodic Lorentz forces are documented as another source of wire bond failure. Spray application of polyurethane coatings, performance of polyurethane-coated wire bonds after climate chamber exp…
The detection of neutrinos from core-collapse supernovae may reveal important process features as well as neutrino properties. The detection of supernova neutrinos is one of the main science drivers for future kiloton-scale neutrino detectors based on liquid argon. Here we show that for such detectors the intrinsically 3D readout in Q-Pix offers numerous advantages relative to a wire-based readout, such as higher reconstruction efficiency, lower energy threshold, considerably lower data rates, and potential pointing information.
Different types of ground-based detectors have been developed and deployed around the world to monitor and study CR variations. We have designed, constructed and operated a three layer small (20x20 cm2) multiwire proportional chamber MWPC telescope for cosmic ray muon observations. In this paper, the technical aspects of this detector will be briefly discussed. The abilities of the telescope in detecting high nergy cosmic ray muons (primaries higher than 20 GeV) were established. The telescope performs well in this sense and showed comparable results with a 1 m2 scintillator detector.
Small-diameter muon drift tube (sMDT) chambers with 15 mm tube diameter are a cost-effective technology for high-precision muon tracking over large areas at high background rates as expected at future high-energy hadron colliders including HL-LHC. The chamber design and construction procedures have been optimized for mass production and provide sense wire positioning accuracy of better than 10 ?m. The rate capability of the sMDT chambers has been extensively tested at the CERN Gamma Irradiation Facility. It exceeds the one of the ATLAS muon drift tube (MDT) chambers, which are operated at unpr…
The dual-phase xenon time projection chamber (TPC) is a leading detector technology in rare event searches for dark matter and neutrino physics. The success of this type of detector technology relies on its capability to detect both primary scintillation and ionization signals from particle interactions in liquid xenon (LXe). The ionization electrons are converted into electroluminescence in the gas xenon (GXe), where a single electron can be amplified by more than 100 times in number of photons in a strong electric field. Maintaining a strong and uniform electric field in the small gas gap in…