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

Detector and accelerator developers need irradiation facilities to test their components under conditions that are as close as possible to real applications as well as to predict and prevent failures in materials. For future accelerator projects like the high-luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) or the Future Circular Collider (FCC) much higher radiation levels are expected with respect to the one encountered at the LHC. Therefore, irradiation experiments are even more fundamental for a safe development of particle detector systems and accelerator equipment. Irradiation facilities, as the one available at CERN, can simulate long-term effects and operational conditions normally occurring over a period of several years within a few days or even hours.
For this reason, a new database of worldwide irradiation facilities has been published online (www.cern.ch/irradiation-facilities) as part of the work of the EU-funded project AIDA-2020 (www.cern.ch/aida-2020) in which EP-DT is involved. With about 200 entries (at the end of 2017), it is the largest and likely most unique database of this kind in the world. This database, setup by Blerina Gkotse and Georgi Gorine, two PhD students of the irradiation facilities team in the DT-DD section, will therefore help potential users to find the most appropriate irradiation facility for their equipment testing. More details about this database are available on the “On Track” newsletter of the AIDA-2020 project at this URL: http://aida2020.web.cern.ch/content/one-list-find-them-all