Horizons of scientific research

Development and manufacture of detectors
for NICA in Protvino>

Due to the reduction in JINR's participation in experiments at U-70, the number of the staff members of the Serpukhov Scientific and Experimental Department was first reduced and afterwards, it was disbanded. Despite this, it was possible to retain a team of highly professional employees capable of meeting complex scientific and technological tasks.

In recent years, all efforts have been focused on implementing the assigned tasks in manufacturing equipment and detectors for experiments at the Nuclotron and the NICA collider. Leading researcher at VBLHEP E.A.Ladygin talks about the work currently underway in this team.

- Evgeniy Aleksandrovich, in your opinion, what knowledge and experience of the department is relevant for the current tasks of the laboratory?

- Extensive experience has been accumulated at SSED in manufacturing calorimeters. Many of them, developed at JINR for experiments at CERN, were manufactured in Protvino by the staff members of the Department.

- Tell us, please, about what has already been done so far.

Manufacturing of MRPC chambers

- For the BM@N experiment at Nuclotron, a ZDC calorimeter was designed that was mounted and used as part of the facility in irradiation sessions in beams of carbon and argon ions. In the last few years, at SSED, together with IHEP (today, the State Scientific Centre of the Russian Federation IHEP - National Research Centre "Kurchatov Institute"), methodological research of Multigap Resistive Flat Chambers (MRPC) with good time resolution were widely carried out. To date, the achieved time resolution for strip-read MRPC is world class. Based on the experience gained, it was decided to develop a TOF700 time-of-flight detector for the BM@N experiment. This detector was developed and manufactured at SSED sites in Protvino and successfully operates in a particle identification facility.

- Were there special rooms equipped for this?

- During the development and testing of TOF700, a production site was developed for the manufacture of MRPC chambers and two stands for measuring the characteristics of these chambers: one - on a muon beam from the U-70 accelerator, the second - to study the operation of chambers on cosmic rays.

- What can you say about the prospects?

- Taking into account the accumulated experience, using the current equipment and production facilities, a group of JINR employees in Protvino and IHEP employees decided to jointly participate in the development of a time-of-flight detector for the SPD experiment at NICA along with a Chinese group from Tsinghua University.

- Has anything already been done in this area? Or is it going to be developed from scratch?

- Prototypes of MRPC chambers with dimensions of 350x450 mm² were designed and developed that showed excellent time resolution (about 40 ps).

Prototypes of electronics for reading signals from MRPC chambers were also developed and manufactured. These are 8-channel amplifiers with comparators and outputs in the LVDS standard for connection to operating TDCs (time-to-digital converters).

- Tell us about your immediate plans, please.

- The technology for manufacturing MRPC chambers developed by JINR and IHEP employees will be transferred to colleagues at the Lebedev Physical Institute to begin their mass production. Physicists from Protvino will participate in testing finished chambers in future, too, including those obtained from China.

We thank Boris Starchenko and Irina Shcherbakova for information support.