New dosimeter design for FCC

Dosimeter-design

by Federico Ravotti on behalf of the Irradiation Facilities Team in EP-DT-DD

The presence of radiation at the LHC and its experiments may cause damage to sensitive electronics equipment, particle detectors and magnets, compromising their operation and affecting their physics program. Until now at CERN silicon-based dosimeters (also called RADMON) have been used to monitor radiation levels within the volume of the LHC experiments, as well as in the in the tunnels areas. However, future circular colliders such as the FCC, reaching collision energies of 100 TeV, is expected to generate unprecedented amounts of radiation posing new challenges for radiation monitoring. Specifically, this calls for the development of new technologies and materials, as current silicon-based dosimetry systems are not capable to fulfil the requirements for ultra-high dose and particle fluence monitoring.
As a possible new technology for particle fluence monitoring, the irradiation facilities team in the DT-DD section has proposed (within Georgi Gorine’s PhD thesis at EPFL in Lausanne, funded by the FCC Special Technologies WP11) the novel idea to use metal thin films. Since previous studies on radiation effects documented an increase of the metal resistivity due to high particle fluence, the team is developing a novel Radiation Dependent Resistor, where the sensitivity to particle fluence in terms of resistivity variation is selected by means of different metal layers geometry and thickness. First prototypes were manufactured at the Centre of Micronanotechnology (CMi) of EPFL. More details about this new technology are available in this EP newsletter article: http://ep-news.web.cern.ch/content/new-dosimeter-design-fcc.