Detector Cooling R&D

Contact person: Paolo Petagna

The “EP-DT Cooling Project” was launched in 2009 with the ambition of creating in EP a pole of competences in all matters of innovative thermal management of detectors. The focus is mainly on highly demanding applications, where the level of engineering optimization needed to achieve the required physics performance is very high. In such cases, the thermal management concepts must be integrated in the detector design from the very beginning. New generation Silicon-Pixel Vertex and Silicon-Strip Tracking detectors are typical examples. The team is able to provide an integrated approach to the off-detector and on-detector aspects of thermal management, and gathers competences on:

  • Cooling plant design and construction
  • Innovative solutions for highly efficient local cooling
  • Environmental monitoring for cold operations

The team’s activities are divided in services and R&D projects (see below). In the first case, at the request of and in collaboration with an experiment, developed innovative technologies that are considered mature enough for real-life application are engineered into a product and finalized for the integration in the experiment. In the second case, innovative technologies – bearing a clear potential for solving or improving issues in existing or future detectors – are studied to explore performance, feasibility and reliability in view of a possible future application. Early direct involvement of experiments is also sought for R&D Projects, for which useful guidelines from the “field” permit to orient the research towards them most useful directions.

Current Cooling R&D

In parallel to the work on FBG Fibre Optic thermo hygrometers an R&D activity on sensor derived from a different grating technique is on-going in collaboration with a pool of...


In collaboration with several European partner institutes, an new version of the portable laboratory unit known as “TRACI”(1) is being developed. The objective is a reduction of...


The EP-DT team is at the forefront of the R&D on several open questions related to an effective and reliable use of micro-structured thermal management devices for HEP detectors...