Test & measurement equipment

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Nuclear research (like most other experimental physics) requires extensive use of specialized electronic and mechanical equipment.

Where many people share a need for a specific device, there is a market for commercial companies to design, manufacture and sell it. This is the case for most electronics for home and office use. To some extent it also applies to electronics for scientific purposes, although in this case production volumes are lower and prices higher for equipment of comparable complexity. But in research work, the need is often so special that we have to design and build whatever we need ourselves, or alternatively put out a contract to have it done, which is not always easy, and in any case quite expensive.

Consequently, the engineers and scientists at our lab do a lot of design, development and prototyping work, often in collaboration with the department's mechanical and electronic workshops.

One of the combined mechanical / electronics efforts we have had gave rise to the detector named Cactus. The "pins" of the cactus are the bases of photomultiplier tubes, which are optically connected to scintillation crystals used to measure the enegy of -radiation from nuclear reactions initiated by the cyclotron beam when it hits a target at the center of the detector. Inside the detector, on the vacuum side, we also have semiconductor crystal particle detectors, that measure the energy of the charged particles that emerge from the same reaction.

At present, a new semiconductor detector array called the SIRI (SIlicon RIng) is under development.

The electronics we use is often of a modular nature, mounted in racks and connected together with cables. The principle is the same as with many home hi-fi systems, even if the amount of modules and cables (plus the price!) somewhat exceeds what is common in such contexts.

An example of a custom-developed electronic module is shown here. This particular one is an interface between two bus standards, Fastbus and the new SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface).