Scientists from St. Petersburg State University have created and commissioned an experimental setup for studying and improving gas cooling technologies for thin, curved silicon pixel detectors with large areas. The developed cooling system can be used in experiments at the NICA collider.
The new gas cooling system is based on the use of chilled nitrogen. Its vapor is directed to the sensors at an extremely low flow rate and velocity. This increases heat transfer and maintains the detector temperature within acceptable limits, even over large areas. The near-zero gas flow velocity prevents vibrations of the sensitive detector layers.
The development is called "TICA-4," which stands for "Thermal Investigations of Cold Gas Arrays." This setup—the fourth generation of similar designs—is planned for use in future MPD (Multi-Purpose Detector) experiments in Dubna, as well as in the upgraded ALICE internal tracking system at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
According to Vladimir Zherebchevsky, Head of the Nuclear Processes Laboratory at St. Petersburg State University, the uniqueness of the facility lies in its ability to study the cooling of thin silicon pixel detectors using a gas flow. An optimal cooling scheme for such detectors was developed, and new data was obtained on the use of cold nitrogen vapor and modern thermal insulation materials, enabling the use of this cooling system in experimental studies to create multi-detector complexes in high-energy physics.
The NICA (Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility) collider is a superconducting proton and heavy ion collider under construction in Dubna since 2013. It is designed for particle physics research requiring the use of silicon pixel detectors, which ensure high-precision reconstruction of charged particle trajectories.
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