NSF-BSF: Collaborative Research: Development of Very Radiation Hard Zero Degree Calorimeters for the LHC

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland is being upgraded to increase the number of beam collisions by a factor of ten beyond the LHC's design value. The increased radiation will damage many of the existing detectors, so new detectors have to be designed and built. This award supports the development of different prototype designs and, after extensive testing, the best design will become the common design for both the ATLAS and CMS experiments. The ATLAS and CMS experiments are the two largest experiments currently mounted at the LHC. The prototypes will be tested at the Soreq Nuclear Research Center in Israel and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. The project has a robust plan in place to engage undergraduate students from a diverse community to participate in the development of these new detectors. The technology developed in the proposed activities may have applications in other areas of science such as radiation oncology and space science. To take full advantage of the LHC, with its unique access to high energy photons caused by the electromagnetic fields of the passing hadrons, and unprecedented access to low-x partons probed by these photons, the experiments need Zero Degree Calorimeters (ZDCs). The ZDCs are destined to be used at the LHC during the high luminosity era which starts after the next Long Shutdown. Luminosities will exceed 7x10^34 /cm^2/sec in the high luminosity era and so the ZDCs must be extraordinarily radiation hard. ZDCs are needed to identify the reaction plane orientation in a heavy ion collision and are an essential detector for measuring ultra-peripheral collisions in heavy ion and p-p collisions. The photon-photon and photon-nucleus interactions allow observations of extremely rare processes, such as light-by-light scattering, which are potentially sensitive to new unobserved physics processes and provide a clean penetrating probe of the nucleus. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.