Particle detector

In experimental and applied particle physics, nuclear physics, and nuclear engineering, a particle detector, also known as a radiation detector, is a device used to detect, track, and/or identify ionizing particles, such as those produced by nuclear decay, cosmic radiation, or reactions in a particle accelerator. Detectors can measure the particle energy and other attributes such as momentum, spin, charge, particle type, in addition to merely registering the presence of the particle. Many of the detectors invented and used so far are ionization detectors (of which gaseous ionization detectors and semiconductor detectors are most typical) and scintillation detectors; but other, completely different principles have also been applied, like Čerenkov light and transition radiation. Historical examples Bubble chamber Wilson cloud chamber (diffusion chamber) Photographic plate Detectors for radiation protection The following types of particle detector are widely used for radiation protection, and are commercially produced in large quantities for general use within the nuclear, medical, and environmental fields. Dosimeter Electroscope (when used as a portable dosimeter) Gaseous ionization detector Geiger counter Ionization chamber Proportional counter Scintillation counter Semiconductor detector Commonly used detectors for particle and nuclear physics Gaseous ionization detector Ionization chamber Proportional counter Multiwire proportional chamber Drift chamber Time projection chamber Micropattern gaseous detector Geiger–Müller tube Spark chamber Solid-state detectors: Semiconductor detector and variants including CCDs Silicon Vertex Detector Solid-state nuclear track detector Cherenkov detector Ring-imaging Cherenkov detector (RICH) Scintillation counter and associated photomultiplier, photodiode, or avalanche photodiode Lucas cell Time-of-flight detector Transition radiation detector Calorimeter Microchannel plate detector Neutron detector Hermetic detector Modern detectors in particle physics combine several of the above elements in layers much like an onion.

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The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge that couples to (interacts with) mass. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately upon generation.

Scintillator

A scintillator ('sɪntɪleɪtər ) is a material that exhibits scintillation, the property of luminescence, when excited by ionizing radiation. Luminescent materials, when struck by an incoming particle, absorb its energy and scintillate (i.e. re-emit the absorbed energy in the form of light). Sometimes, the excited state is metastable, so the relaxation back down from the excited state to lower states is delayed (necessitating anywhere from a few nanoseconds to hours depending on the material).

ATLAS experiment

ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle detector experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. The experiment is designed to take advantage of the unprecedented energy available at the LHC and observe phenomena that involve highly massive particles which were not observable using earlier lower-energy accelerators. ATLAS was one of the two LHC experiments involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012.

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