detectors

It’s a mystery where ultra-high-energy cosmic rays come from and what they’re made of. But a new technique, currently in the works, could drastically improve scientists’ chances of finding out.

Scientists on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider just completed the installation of a crucial component for tracking high-energy particle jets. Without it, physicists would be lacking crucial tools to select which events out of billions to store and analyze.

One month ago, Fermilab's Bob Peterson embarked on a month-long journey in the Atlantic Ocean with two cosmic ray muon detectors, collecting data for science and education programs. This offers a chance to study how cosmic ray recordings differ on land and sea and at different latitudes. The data will be accessible to high school students and teachers in several countries who use similar detectors to learn about particle physics. Bob recorded the entire adventure, which concluded last week, in Quantum Diaries. He posted the following entry on May 12, just as his ship was about to pass the equator.

With a detector encompassing a cubic kilometer of ice almost directly beneath the South Pole, IceCube is the world’s largest neutrino telescope. Like many other neutrino detectors, IceCube uses photomultiplier tubes to peer through a clear medium, looking for faint streaks of blue Cherenkov radiation – shockwaves from particles that are moving faster than light can travel in that medium. Most of what any such detector sees is background, but occasionally an energetic neutrino collides with an atomic nucleus and produces a muon headed in the same direction – the main quarry in the hunt for neutrinos from beyond the Sun.

One of the four major experiments built around the collision points of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, LHCb studies B particles - particles composed of beauty quarks. By detecting and analyzing the decays of millions of Bs, it explores the imperfect symmetry between matter and antimatter, the slight imbalance that allowed matter to survive over antimatter and build the universe we inhabit today. This walk through the event display of the first B particle detected by LHCb shows how the collision data is analyzed.

A 33-ton portion of the DIRC—the Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light detector from the BaBar experiment—was recently moved from Building 620 to temporarily storage in Building 720 on SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory grounds.

Many 16-year-olds learn important life skills at their first summer jobs – the value of a dollar or how to deal with the public. Natalie Harrison learned detector modeling, particle astrophysics and C++.