DETECTORS

Detectors are essential instruments in experimental research, in physics as in many other scientific disciplines. In particle physics, in particular, the experiments use complex detection systems for studying particle collisions, with the goal of tracking their trajectories, measuring their physical parameters, and identifying their type. Modern experiments in fundamental physics, like, for example, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and ALICE currently operating at the LHC accelerator of CERN in Geneva, are equipped with highly complex and technologically advanced detectors. This is also true of the detectors adopted in experiments that look for gravitational waves (like LIGO and Virgo), which require an extremely high level of sensitivity.

In the field of astronomy too, detectors play a crucial role in observing and recording electromagnetic signals coming from space, in a very wide range of frequencies: from optical to radio, up to the most energetic X- and gamma-rays. Detectors designed for fundamental research may be very useful for applications, in particular, in the medical and diagnostics field too. Medical imaging techniques, like computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance, for example, are based on using detectors for identifying the presence of wounds or diseases in various organs and tissues of the human body. In radiotherapy, detectors are used for monitoring the doses of radiation administered during the treatment of tumours.
Given their crucial importance for fundamental research and applications, the design and building of increasingly efficient and sensitive detectors constitutes a genuine research sector that involves many researchers with different backgrounds.

The LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) detector at the LHC experiment at CERN (© CERN) Some of the team members that realized AdA

This image illustrates all three classes of the telescopes planned for the southern hemisphere at ESO's Paranal Observatory, as viewed from the centre of the array. This rendering is not an accurate representation of the final array layout, but it illustrates the enormous scale of the CTA telescopes and the array itself.

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