Rapid-fire particle collisions recorded by innovative chip at the speed of 1.5 billion per second at CERN
In the heart of Europe, between France and Switzerland, lies the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - a colossal underground facility where physicists collide particles at nearly the speed of light to study fundamental particles like the Higgs boson. The LHC's high-energy particle collisions produce intense radiation that would destroy standard commercial electronics. However, a team of engineers at Columbia University has developed specialized silicon chips to tackle this challenge.
These chips, essential for the ATLAS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, boast advanced radiation-hardening and analog-to-digital conversion capabilities. They can digitize selected signals with precision, capturing details that no existing component could reliably record. The chips' resilience allows them to endure the harsh conditions of the LHC for over a decade, thanks to the team's design of components and digital systems that automatically correct errors.
At the ATLAS detector, these chips are crucial for converting the analog electrical pulses generated by particle collisions into precise digital data. One chip, the trigger ADC, is already operational and filters the billion-hit collision storm by selecting only the most scientifically relevant events for recording. Another chip, the data acquisition ADC, digitizes these selected events with high precision, enabling deeper study of fundamental particles like the Higgs boson.
The market for radiation-resistant components is too small to attract commercial investment, so these specialized solutions are necessary. The new chips, currently being produced and installed as part of the upcoming LHC upgrade, will enable more detailed, high-rate, and radiation-tolerant data acquisition at the LHC, underpinning crucial upgrades to CERN's experimental apparatus and future particle physics discoveries.
The researchers reported their findings in the IEEE Open Journal of the Solid-State Circuits Society. Peter Kinget, the Bernard J. Lechner Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia Engineering, stated that the industry couldn't justify the effort, so academia had to step in to develop these specialized chips.
[1] Kinget, P., et al. (2021). Radiation-Hardened Analog-to-Digital Converters for the ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition Systems. IEEE Open Journal of the Solid-State Circuits Society. [3] Columbia Engineering. (2021, March 18). New Chips Enable High-Rate, Radiation-Tolerant Data Acquisition at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. ScienceDaily. [5] Columbia University. (2021, March 18). New Chips Enable High-Rate, Radiation-Tolerant Data Acquisition at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Columbia News.
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