Submitted by iknapper on

 

New MicroMegas tracking detectors successfully used by winners of BL4S 2017

During the course of 2017, in cooperation with the CERN workshop for gaseous detectors, and thanks to the contributions from this year’s BL4S supporters, the BL4S team built 4 MicroMegas detectors. These are state of the art tracking detectors that can also be found in other CERN experiments (e.g. ATLAS or CAST).

In contrast to the Delay Wire Chambers that have been used so far to record the trajectories of particles in BL4S experiments, the new MicroMegas defectors have both a larger surface and a better resolution. This opens up a whole new range of experiments that have not been feasible so far.

The team Charging Cavaliers, one of the winners of BL4S 2017, successfully used the new detectors for their experiment. They were able to show that the trajectories of charged particles were deflected by a magnetic field by exactly the angle that members of the team had computed. This was an important achievement required to reach their ultimate goal: the detection of fractionally charged particles.

Reading out data from a MicroMegas detector requires specialized electronics. We would like to thank our colleagues from CEA Saclay (France) for lending those electronics to BL4S.