Discovery

On December 25, at CERN1, installation of the world’s largest silicon tracking detector was successfully completed.

ScienceDaily reported, with a total surface area of 205 square meters, about the same as a singles tennis court, the CMS Silicon Strip Tracking Detector is by far the largest semiconductor silicon detector ever constructed. Its silicon sensors are patterned to provide a total of 10 million individual sensing strips, each of which is read out by one of 80,000 custom designed microelectronics chips. Data are then transported via 40,000 optical fibres into the CMS data acquisition system.

The complete system operating at the LHC will produce data at a higher rate than the entire global telephone system. The tracker will be able to measures the three-dimensional positions of charged particles, such as electrons or protons, as they travel through the detector. This device will help explain the structure of matter and answer other fundamental questions about the universe, hopefully.

Adapted from materials provided by CERN.