"Cut and fold" - lightweight cables for ZEUS

19 January 2000

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This flexible copper sheet contains up to 20 m of thin, lightweight cable designed to fit at the heart of the ZEUS detector at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg. ZEUS studies high-energy collisions bwteen electrons and protons at the HERA collider at DESY, and to prepare for an uprgade in the collider's performance later this year, ZEUS itself will be upgraded with a new "microvertex" detector to measure precisely particle tracks close to the collision point. This will allow the experimenters to study rarer processes, but it has presented challenges with the design of the detector - in particular how to get signals out from the alignment system with a cable that would take up almost no space and which has very little mass to distort particle tracks. The solution, developed in Physics Department at Oxford University, uses a photofabrication technique to etch conducting tracks only 0.25 mm wide onto very flexible copper sheet, 1 m long and 0.5 m wide, on a polyamide backing, as seen in this image. The sheet is cut to give a continuous cable with 32 tracks, and up to 20 m long, which can be folded into a small space.

Credit: Physics Photographic Unit, Oxford University