Particle detectors, as a technique, encompass the ensemble of methods and instrumentation used to register, localize, and characterize ionizing particles through their interactions with matter. These techniques exploit processes such as ionization, scintillation, Cherenkov radiation, and semiconductor charge collection to convert particle passage into measurable electrical or optical signals. Detector techniques include tracking (e.g., gaseous wire chambers, silicon strip and pixel detectors), calorimetry (sampling and homogeneous calorimeters for energy measurement), and time-of-flight methods for velocity determination, often integrated in complex, layered systems enabling precise reconstruction of particle trajectories, momenta, identities, and interaction vertices in nuclear, particle, and astroparticle physics experiments.
The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) require high-performance event-selection systems—known as "triggers" in particle physics—to filter the flow of data to manageable levels. The triggers pick events with distinguishing ...
General Physics
Apr 11, 2024
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Last week, at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference, the CMS collaboration presented a measurement of the effective leptonic electroweak mixing angle. The result is the most precise measurement performed at a hadron ...
General Physics
Apr 8, 2024
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Operating at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since 2022, the FASER experiment is designed to search for extremely weakly interacting particles. Such particles are predicted by many theories beyond the Standard Model that ...
General Physics
Apr 8, 2024
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Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) have been widely used in various applications requiring single photon detection thanks to their attractive performances. Since SNSPDs are thin films of serval nanometers ...
Optics & Photonics
Mar 28, 2024
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Ever since its discovery, dark matter has remained invisible to scientists despite the launch of multiple ultra-sensitive particle detector experiments around the world over several decades.
General Physics
Mar 27, 2024
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In March 2024, the CMS collaboration announced the observation of two photons creating two tau leptons in proton–proton collisions. It is the first time that this process has been seen in proton–proton collisions, which was ...
General Physics
Mar 26, 2024
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Neutrinos and antineutrinos are nearly massless particles produced in many nuclear reactions, including the fission of uranium in nuclear power plants on Earth and the fusion reactions at the core of the sun.
General Physics
Mar 26, 2024
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Particles colliding in accelerators produce numerous cascades of secondary particles. The electronics processing the signals avalanching in from the detectors then have a fraction of a second in which to assess whether an ...
General Physics
Mar 21, 2024
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In particle colliders that reveal the hidden secrets of the tiniest constituents of our universe, minute particles leave behind extremely faint electrical traces when they are generated in enormous collisions. Some detectors ...
Superconductivity
Mar 11, 2024
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264
The team of physicists working on the LHCb Collaboration at CERN has found that bottom quarks are more likely to exist in baryons than mesons as the density of the environment in which they exist increases. In their paper ...
