Wheels within silicon wheels for CMS

3 November 1999

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Last week's image showed a giant wheel of iron for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), a large detector being built for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, Geneva. Here we see a prototype of smaller wheels that will form part of the heart of the detector. The concentric rings contain silicon wafers (visible at the top left and centre, more clearly on the larger image) which will surround the point where high-energy protons collide. The silicon detects the position of the passing particles with great precision, allowing the tracks of the hundreds of particles emerging from each collision to be reconstructed accurately. This part of the detector will hold 448 silicon wafers supported on a carbon-fibre structure, with an overall diameter of 80 cm.

Credit: CERN Photo / CMS