Monday, 28 May 2012


A study of methods of Particle Detection 


Particle physics is the study of the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces of nature. Modern particle physics “involves the biggest, most complicated experiments in the history of science, with the fastest computers, the coldest temperatures and the strongest magnets on earth.(Particle Physics UK) It has featured as one of the largest scientific media stories of recent years. Rumours inclyded that the particle collisions taking place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva would produce black holes into which the Earth could be swallowed. However, how much do most people know about the type of science that is being carried out at CERN, as well as at other places around the world?
The high-energy particle physics being carried out near Geneva comes under the category of accelerator physics. The other category, non-accelerator physics, is where natural processes have produced the particles and we detect their effects. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages. “In cosmic rays, nature provides particles at energies far beyond anything we can contemplate achieving on earth [at accelerators]. However these rays come at random and are much less intense than beams made at accelerators. It was the desire to replicate the cosmic rays under controlled conditions that led to modern high-energy physics at accelerators.” (Close, 2004) However, unveiling the tiniest constituents of matter with accelerators is only half the battle. Physicists also need extraordinary particle detectors to be able to observe what happens in high-energy collisions.
Detectors are instruments that count particles, visualize tracks, measure particle energies, record time-of-flight and identify different particles. Detectors can be as tiny as computer chips or as big as apartment houses, containing thousands of tons of steel and other material. Detection is possible only through the interaction between particles or radiation and matter as they pass through. For example,  “when a charged particle travels through a gas, it leaves behind a trail of ionised atoms. A whole range of particle detectors, from the cloud chamber to the wire spark chamber, depends on sensing this trail of ionisation in some way.” (Close, 2004) p.63 However “ways of detecting subatomic particles are more familiar than many people realise. The crackle of a Geiger counter, and the light emitted when electrically charged particles, such as electrons, hit specially prepared materials forming the picture on our television screen, are but two”(Close, 2004) p.62.
In this project I will survey the various methods of particle detection. Professor P. M. S. Blackett, F.R.S., Nobel Laureate said in (Wilson & Rochester, 1952) pVII, that “this world of sub-atomic events is one which can be easily visualised and understood without the aid of complicated mathematics or the mastery of deep theories.” A good example of which is the cloud chamber. Without going into “the subtle intricacies and uncertainties of modern fundamental theoretical physics” it is still possible for an experimenter to investigate particle interactions, and by so doing to enter “the world of energetic elementary particles”.



Types of Particle Detector


Scintillators

Scintillators are materials which emit light when high energy particles hit them. There are two types of scintillators: the inorganic and the organic type. In the inorganic kind atoms are ionised, which can be read as an electrical signal. In the organic type, usually plastic, the signal is in the form of photons of light emitted as the material’s electrons ‘de-excite’ after having collided with the incident particle. (FermiNationalAcceleratorLaboritory, 2004) All materials scintillate to some extent but the light is usually absorbed again before it has a chance to reach the edges of the material. (Allison, 2006)
The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory website describes how “detectors based on recording scintillation light were used from the earliest days of nuclear research.” Probably the most famous and most significant particle experiment of all time, Ernst Rutherford’s alpha scattering from gold foil in 19??, used a circular scintillation screen coated with zinc sulphate to measure the angle at which the alpha particles were deflected, as shown in figure 1. Each flash was recorded manually and the evidence gathered gave a very strong indication for there being a small, dense nucleus, as opposed to the ‘plum pudding’ model that had existed before. However, with modern scintillators the signal can be measured by using light-sensitive devices called photomultiplier tubes, as I did in my project detecting muons at Queen Mary, University of London.
An example of a scintillator that we have probably all come into contact with is the conventional television display. The screen emits light when bit by the electron beam from the back. (Allison, 2006) Other examples include the “phosphor coating on the inside face of a cathode-ray tube” (p.162)
However scintillators give poor spatial information. A modern variant uses bundles of scintillating optical fibres. However this method still has considerable draw backs.


Cloud Chamber

Invented by C.T.R Wilson in 1910, the cloud chamber or expansion method made the tracks of particles visible for the first time. Detectors such as cloud chambers and bubble chambers work on the principle of having their contents in an unstable, so that even a small disturbance in the charges, such as may be applied by a charged particle, is enough to collapse that state. Cloud chambers use an atmosphere of supercooled alcohol. This means that the alcohol is at a temperature or pressure where it would normally be liquid, but it has been cooled or had the pressure removed so rapidly that this has not had time to happen. Then, when a charged particle ionises some of the atoms this is enough to collapse this state and trigger the condensation process, causing a trail of droplets in the particles path. These tracks can be illuminated and photographed. Professor Frank Close describes in Particle Physics 2004 how, “when illuminated, the tracks stand out like the dust motes in a sunbeam.”  Figure 2 shows Wilson’s cloud chamber set-up.
Discoveries made using the cloud chamber include “the first example of an antiparticle, the positron.”  (Close, 2004) p.65 Figure 3 shows the track of a positron moving upwards through a 3mm lead plate. Its trajectory is curved by a magnetic field. It could either have been an electron moving downwards or a positively charged particle moving upwards. The direction was determined from the observation that the particle had lost energy going through the lead plate and was therefore curving more in the magnetic field. It mass was determined to be equal to that of the electron, thereby ruling out it being an observation of a proton.(Observing the World of Particles)
Cloud chambers were also used in the discovery of strange particles in cosmic rays. (Close, 2004) However, cloud chambers took a very long time to re-set and were no longer adequate for the higher energy particles being produced at accelerator experiments. This led to the invention of the bubble chamber.


Bubble Chamber

The bubble chamber Worked on much the same principle as a cloud chamber, but with the active volume a liquid, heated close to its boiling point. If you remove some of the pressure it would usually being to boil. However, if you do this rapidly enough then the liquid enters a superheated state. The process that then occurs when the liquid is disturbed is similar to the process that occurs in the cloud chamber, apart from instead of condensing the liquid begins to boil when disturbed, forming little bubbles of gas. It is these that line the trail of the particle. Bubble chamber apparatus would involve the active volume of the detector connected to a piston, which could lower the pressure quickly, and would trigger a photograph of the chamber. The piston would then return and the chamber would be re-set. Figure 5 shows the traces obtained by a bubble chamber.
Bubble chambers superseded cloud chambers by the 1950s because high-energy particles were now being produced at accelerators, which would pass straight through a cloud chamber without interacting.
                  For example, to record the whole life of a strange particle, from production to decay, at energies of a few GeV would have required a cloud chamber 100 metres long!(Close, 2004)
Bubble chambers would have a greater chance of detecting these because, compared to the thin gas in a cloud chamber, the liquid in them would have a much greater density of atoms, which meant there was therefore a much greater chance of interaction. During the 1960’s and 1970’s a great deal of new elementary particles were discovered using the bubble chamber. Originally designed by Donald Glaser, the design for the bubble chamber was improved by Luis Alvarez, who, instead of filling it with water, used liquid hydrogen at a temperature of 26K, an image from which can be seen in figure 7. However, since the rate at which a bubble chamber can acquire and analyse data is rather slow, bubble chambers are no longer used for research purposes. (FermiNationalAcceleratorLaboritory, 2004)

 

Photography

Discovered by accident by Henri Becquerel after the photographic plates he left in a drawer with specimens of uranium sulphate recorded their tracks, photographic emulsions have been used ever since. The fine grains of silver halide in a photographic emulsion are metastable and a change of state can be caused by the energy deposited along the tracks of charged particles as they cross, much in the same way light or X-rays do. (Allison, 2006) Developed by Cecil Powell to give better sensitivity and a larger active volume, nuclear emulsions were extensively used in the 1950’s as well as later on at particle accelerators. Used in Powell’s discovery of the pion in 1947 as well roentgen’s discovery of the X-ray, the nuclear emulsion’s high spatial resolution of about one micron means that it is still used today investigating very short lived particles. (Observing the World of Particles)
The advantages of the nuclear emulsion were that it was a “robust cheap cordless radiation monitor which does not require calibrating” and traditionally “film badges were carried by all radiation workers to record the time-integrated radiation dose to which they had been exposed.” (Allison, 2006) However it was only able to give a two-dimensional position. They were therefore replaced by three-dimensional detectors, such as wire chambers.

Wire Chambers

The ionisation trail of particles through a gas-filled chamber can be made to accelerate towards positive or negative terminals. By placing thin wires periodically throughout the chamber in three dimensions and applying high voltages across them a signal can be recoded of any ionisation that takes place within the chamber. When an ion or electron is attracted towards a wire it is accelerated by the force and so will ionise other atoms as it travels towards it. This means that once it reaches the wire the signal is strong enough to be collected by a computer. By analysing which wire the signal came from it is possible to obtain a precise spatial measurement. Each particle will lead to several signals as it ionises along its path and so a three-dimension trajectory and time of flight may be obtained.




 

Cerenkov Detectors

Cerenkov detectors are based on the phenomenon of Cerenkov radiation. Discovered by Pavel Cerenkov in 1934, Cerenkov radiation is when particles give off blue light when travelling faster than the speed of light in a particular medium. (Pavel A. Cherenkov - Biography) “Although light travels faster than anything else in vacuum, particles can travel faster than light in gases, liquids or solids. If charged particles travel faster than light in such a medium, they give up some of their energy by emitting blue light. In a transparent medium like water, ice, oil or gas, the blue light can escape and transmit the information that a fast charged particle has passed through. Using various media to optimize the size of the light cone around the particle's direction, physicists build Cerenkov detectors that contain light-sensitive devices called photomultipliers.” (FermiNationalAcceleratorLaboritory, 2004) Figure 8 shows the giant detector of Super-Kamiokande in Japan. It consists of a water tank of diameter 39.3m and 41.4m in height surrounded by photomultiplier tubes, which you can see being fixed in Figure 9.

Calorimeters

Calorimeters, as the name suggests, are concerned with measuring the energy of an incident particle. As particles move through matter they lose a fraction or all of their energy due to interactions with it. This energy is deposited in the Calorimeter and can be measured to give the energy lost and determine the total energy of the incoming particle. They are made out of a variety of materials including “solid lead-glass, cesium iodide, liquid argon and silica aerogel.(FermiNationalAcceleratorLaboritory, 2004) Different types of Calorimeters are made to absorb different types of particles. “Electromagnetic calorimeters measure the energy of leptons (such as electrons) and photons (light particles) as they interact with the electrically charged particles inside matter. Hadronic calorimeters monitor the energy of particles containing quarks as they interact with atomic nuclei.(FermiNationalAcceleratorLaboritory, 2004)
Because calorimeters attempt to absorb all of the energy of a particle moving through it they are often of vast volumes. In modern detectors they are built around other types of detector. By knowing the amount of energy present at the collision point, and measuring the loss in energy during each interaction, the types of particles produced may be pieced together. Figure 9 shows the readout from the ATLAS detector at CERN. The outer ring is a calorimeter detector and it surrounds other, smaller types of detector.


Silicon detectors

Silicon detectors work in a similar way to the wire chamber. A series of silicon semiconductor strips a fraction of a millimetre wide are built up on pads and a voltage applied across them.
Charged particles passing through the silicon create electric signals that exactly indicate which strips the particles have crossed.” (FermiNationalAcceleratorLaboritory, 2004) These strips are then connected to tiny electronic chips, which amplify and feed the signal back to a computer. Spatial resolution in very good and is constantly improving as smaller and smaller pieces of silicon can be manufactured and the rate of data acquisition is extremely fast.

Neutrino detectors

Because neutrinos have no charge and possibly no mass* they interact very little with matter. Therefore, as Frank Close describes it “the technique [for detecting them] is to have huge samples, such as swimming pool volumes of pure water.” p.47 This is in the hope that you may get a few interaction ever so often. However, the high number of neutrinos that are passing through everything, as described in my project on detecting muons at Queen Mary, University of London, does make this probability significantly higher.
*the mass of the neutrino is a topic of great contention. Some recent research has shown that it may have a very small, but significant mass.

Modern Particle detectors

Depending on the type of accelerator and the particles and forces to be studied, physicists combine various detection devices arranged in intricate configurations, as briefly discussed above under Calorimeters. In the case of colliding beams, physicists build a detector surrounding the point at which the two beams collide. Like the layers of an onion, such a detector contains successive layers of detection devices with different functions. Close to the centre, physicists place precision tracking instruments such as silicon detectors and wire chambers. The instruments are usually surrounded by calorimeters that measure the energy of particles passing through. The outer shell of a detector, farthest from the collision area, is devoted to detecting muons, heavy electron-like particles that can travel a couple of kilometres through rock and steel before decaying. (FermiNationalAcceleratorLaboritory, 2004)
Physicists have to consider which detectors are most suitable for a particular experiment. As Allison describes, it is often the form and rapidity of the output data that is often the deciding factor:
“Photographic dada are cheap, of high quality and convenient in a low technology environment. Electronic methods are often preferred because they can be linked straight to a computer. Circumstances and resources determine which detector is used.” (Allison, 2006)p161
A great example of this is at the Atlas detector at CERN, shown in Figure 11.


Accelerators

Modern particle physics experiments used accelerators to fire particles either at a static target or at each other and they use detectors to analyse what happens. There are several types of accelerators; cyclotrons, synchotrons and linear. Cyclotrons were one of the earliest types of particle accelerators and used magnets to bend the paths of particles into a circle and electric fields to accelerate them. Figure 12 shows a diagram of a cyclotron. Synchotrons, like those used at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, are able to accelerate multiple particles at the same time and also in different directions at the same time, and are reaching ever higher energies. However, due to synchrotron radiation (where the energy of the particles leaks away) they have to be made with a large radius in order to achieve high energies. For example the LHC is a twenty seven kilometre ring and as such is the largest experiment ever conducted. Linear accelerators, such as the one at Stanford, are the most precise, but unlike how the circular accelerators can accelerate the same particle many times, it can only do so once. An exciting prospect under construction will be the two linear accelerators aligned end to end which will fire particles at each other, rather than at a static target as has been done before.
Check back for a soon to come post about methods of particle detection!