Neutron hardness testing of electronic components for the LHC
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a new colliding beam facility under construction at the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN). At this facility, high-intensity beams of 7-TeV protons will collide head-on to produce proton-proton collisions with a total center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV. Two large general-purpose detectors are being built to observe collisions between the protons. One of these, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), will have precision crystal calorimetry, many square meters of high-resolution silicon tracker, and a large copper sampling hadron calorimeter to absorb the hadronic energy carried away from the interaction region, and all this will be placed inside a 4-T magnetic field. In the design of their electronics, the authors are using processes that are known to be radiation hard at their levels. They are using the Intersil UHF1x, and the Honeywell GaAs CHFET process and custom-designed APDs from Hamatasu Photonics. Nevertheless, to ensure that the radiation tolerance is maintained during production, they need to continuously monitor the performance of the components as they are manufactured. Device tolerance to gamma radiation can be measured relatively easily using intense {sup 60}Co sources, but medium-level sources of neutrons on a continuous basis are much more difficult to obtain, With the normal choice being research reactors. Since {sup 252}Cf has a peak neutron emission close to the maximum of their expected neutron energy spectrum, it is very suitable for this application. After using {sup 252}Cf sources at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to conduct measurements on APD prototypes, they decided that the best way to set up a facility to provide the neutron irradiation tolerance monitoring during manufacture would be to build one at the University of Minnesota (Minnesota) and use {sup 252}Cf sources to provide the neutrons. The facility at Minnesota will be used primarily to test electronics components for the CMS crystal calorimeter. They will use two sources of {sup 252}Cf, with a combined mass of 15 mg. The sources will be kept in a special housing that they are building in an old target room of their unused tandem Van der Graff accelerator. By bringing the components in close proximity to the fixed sources, they will be able to obtain integrated neutron fluxes of 2 x 10{sup 17} n{center_dot}m{sup {minus}2} in a period of a few days. This will allow them to reliably determine the hardness to neutron irradiation of the components as they are produced.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN (US)
- OSTI ID:
- 20093646
- Journal Information:
- Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Vol. 82; Conference: 2000 Annual Meeting - American Nuclear Society, San Diego, CA (US), 06/04/2000--06/08/2000; Other Information: PBD: 2000; ISSN 0003-018X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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