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.