Last October , a workshop on Detector R&D was held at Fermilab sponsored by the five DOE Laboratories and the DPF. As the slides show, there is fascinating instrumentation research in our community at both the labs and the universities, but there is also reason to think that this effort would benefit from coherent, national attention. To that end, during the discussion the final day it was decided that the DPF organize a Task Force to consider how a national effort might be created. The attachment to this post is the charge to the Task Force. Also attached is a memo to the workshop attendees describing the task force plans. The membership is currently being identified.DPF Task Force on Instrumentation in High Energy Physics
– January 26, 2011Posted in: current
Last October , a workshop on Detector R&D was held at Fermilab sponsored by the five DOE Laboratories and the DPF. As the slides show, there is fascinating instrumentation research in our community at both the labs and the universities, but there is also reason to think that this effort would benefit from coherent, national attention. To that end, during the discussion the final day it was decided that the DPF organize a Task Force to consider how a national effort might be created. The attachment to this post is the charge to the Task Force. Also attached is a memo to the workshop attendees describing the task force plans. The membership is currently being identified.
Wonderful effort toward Detector R&D is going to move.
I am curious to know about that is there possibilities of other country’s faculty participation. If yes then what would be mode of contribution.
I’d like to point out that in electronics although we may still lead industry in amplifiers, and shaper (this is sort of unique to particle detectors), we are adapting ASICs and high speed serial data transmission over fiber optics from industry to our special (radiation, ultra high density, low power and high reliability due to very limited access for maintenance) applications in detector front-end. On the back-end we adapt FPGA and sometimes DSP from industry. All of these are beyond our traditions of having graduate students and postdocs to learn from scratch and become experts in a matter of a year or two. We now need very specially trained researchers, who are good at electrical engineering but knowledgable about our detector and its readout techniques, and above all, trained as physicists to think out-of-box when needed. These people are very hard to find. We still have some in our fields in labs and universities. At universities these people are paid with project money as postdocs are, but they stay much longer than postdocs and are in a vulnerable situation. We must find a way to keep these people for our field so that we keep the core expertise. Graduate students and postdocs can learn from them, trained by them, so as to get a jump start in hardware experience.
I am replying to myself. There might be a word limit on the comment, I could not finish what I wanted to say in the first part. All I want to bring to the attention of the community is that with the advance of our detector and detection technology, the requirements in readout electronics are much higher now. Although detector, amplifiers (and shapers) are still our specialty, we now adapt a lot of things from industry, such as ASICs, optical links and FPGAs to our special applications. Many of these are beyond the time scope of a graduate student or a postdoc. We must find a mechanism to keep those very specially trained hardware experts in our field. These people are now scattered in labs and uninversities. Those who are in universities need help. We should still continue our tradition and require graduate students and postdocs get training in hardware (detector and its readout) so that they become real experimentalists. In so doing we need to keep the continuaty of our core expertise, the group of people, in our field so that young people can get a jump start in hardware.