New NICADD equipment
scintillating for scientists

by Tom Parisi

The Northern Illinois Center for Accelerator and Detector Development (NICADD) has a new tool that will help scientists capture data on the basic building blocks of the universe.

The extruder, which stretches 70 feet in length in assembly-line fashion, is up and running at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Batavia.

The cutting-edge, custom-built extruder line will produce scintillating detectors – plastic devices injected with dye so they glow when struck by high-energy particles or photons. Scientists who work in the field of accelerator physics can use scintillators to see what’s happening during their experiments.

Fermilab is home to the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Tevatron Collider, which smashes together protons and anti-protons traveling at nearly the speed of light.

The Tevatron has helped physicists observe the smallest bits of matter ever identified, such as quarks, unimaginably tiny particles inside a proton. The accelerator also can re-create the conditions of the early universe – though in a much smaller volume. Creating tiny fireballs of high density and high temperature, physicists produce the particles that were abundant in the early universe, a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Near the end of the decade, however, the Tevatron will be surpassed in its research capabilities by a collider under construction in Europe. New types of accelerators are being designed, therefore, requiring new types of detectors and novel scintillators.

Fermilab is no stranger to scintillator production.

The lab over the years has supervised the production of about 2 million feet of scintillator material at a local extrusion company, materials scientist Anna Pla-Dalmau said. The new extruder will allow for streamlined, automated production of uniquely shaped scintillators for prototype projects.

“There’s less handling involved in the process, so there’s less room for human error,” said Pla-Dalmau, an NIU alum (Ph.D. in chemistry, ’90) who heads up the group of scientists who oversee extruder operations. The group includes Fermilab technicians Jerry Zimmerman and Chuck Serritella and “scientist on the spot” Victor Rykalin of NIU.

Last year, the university formed an internal collaboration to support development of the next generation of detectors at the Fermilab Scintillator Detector Development Laboratory. The collaboration formally is between NICADD and the university’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. NICADD purchased the $560,000 extruder, and NIU mechanical engineers will assist in designing equipment needed in scintillator production.

“Fermilab is a world-class research facility, and NIU now has the equipment to produce novel scintillating detectors, so the collaboration makes perfect sense,” NIU physicist Jerry Blazey said. Blazey serves as co-director of NICADD and as a spokesperson for Fermilab’s DZero collaboration, one of the world’s premier experiments in particle physics.

“Our goal is to build detectors for the next generation of particle experiments,” Fermilab scientist Alan Bross added.

In addition to testing Fermilab detector ideas, the extruder can be used to test scintillators for scientists at particle accelerator facilities in New York, Japan and Switzerland, Bross said.

6-9-03