Calorimetric Views

BEHOLDING beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities, for he has hold not of an image but of a reality, and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life? PLATO

The calorimeter design for GLAST produces flashes of light that are used to determine how much energy is in each gamma-ray. A calorimeter ("calorie-meter") is a device that measures the energy (heat: calor) of a particle when it is totally absorbed. CsI(Tl) bars, arranged in a segmented manner, give both longitudinal and transverse information about the energy deposition pattern. Once a gamma ray penetrates through the anticoincidence shield, the silicon-strip tracker and lead converter planes, it then passes into the cesium-iodide calorimeters. This causes a scintillation reaction in the cesium-iodide, and the resultant light flash is photoelectrically converted to a voltage. This voltage is then digitized, recorded and relayed to earth by the spacecraft's onboard computer and telemetry antenna. Cesium-iodide blocks are arranged in two perpendicular directions, to provide additional positional information about the shower.

The complexity and sum over histories leaves an indelible pathway for all energy Disposition patterns(photons in the Electromagnetic Calorimeters), as well as, an adventure "within the confines of the Hadronic Calorimeters views."

In a sense when referenced to a "configuration space," then what design of the calorimeter that we would measure the earliest signs o the universe in expression as the "supposed productions of the cosmos." That we could say, we have a "new view in the window of that same cosmos?"

Iron wedges of the CMS forward calorimeter-Source from Quantum Diaries Survivor.

The future

If new detectors will ever be built to explore a yet higher energy regime than the one about to be probed by LHC, calorimeters will be as necessary as they are today. The following characteristics will be desirable in a design of new generation:

* self-triggering (the ability of independent portions of the system to identify and measure a signal, interpreting it and sending an accept signal to the data aquisition system)
* stand-alone tracking (the ability of the calorimeter system to independently determine the direction of crossing particles)
* an integrated time-of-flight measurement (the capability to separate different particle signals based on the delay between their arrival time and the interaction time)
* high resolution and granularity (attainable with silicon technology)

The needs of these fancy features, however, rests on the specific hunt that we will decide to embark on. Which, in turn, critically depends on the discoveries that the Large Hadron Collider will produce!Calorimeters for High-Energy Physics - part 2, by Tommaso Dorigo

See:

Calorimeters for High Energy Physics experiments - part 1
Calorimeters for High-Energy Physics - part 2 April 11, 2008