Silicon sandwiches feed LHC's upgraded collision appetite
Thursday, March 30, 2017 - 07:51
in Physics & Chemistry
In a special, dust-free, clean laboratory, straddling the Swiss-French border, a group of physicists spend their time probing hand-sized hexagons of silicon. These hexagons are a fraction of a millimetre thick and are made up of over a hundred smaller hexagons, individual sensors each roughly one centimeter across. Together with layers of metal, the sensors will form a new subdetector to replace part of the end-cap calorimeters in CERN's CMS experiment.