The Department of Physics and Electronics at Rhodes University was accepted as an associate member of the ALICE collaboration project at the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) Large Hadron Collider (LHC). 

 

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is the detector at the CERN LHC dedicated to the study of the properties of a state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma. This is accomplished through colliding large nuclei at speeds close to the speed of light, where the resulting temperature and energy density from these nuclear collisions are high enough to create a quark-gluon plasma. The experiment recreates conditions that are believed to have existed around 10 microseconds after the Big Bang, long before the formation of nuclei or atoms. It is also thought that the quark-gluon plasma would exist in the core of exotic stellar objects such as neutron stars.   

 

Rhodes is joining an extensive international collaboration consisting of 163 institutions from 37 countries. It was officially announced on 26 June.

 

The ALICE collaboration is planning a major upgrade of the detector planned to start in 2019. The Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) within the Department of Physics and Electronics will actively participate in the development of innovative electronics and software technologies to be implemented in the upgrade. Rhodes University will initially contribute to the Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) and, more specifically, in the replacement of the Global Tracking Unit. The TRD has to achieve a readout rate of 40kHz at the next upgrade and, to reach this goal, a new readout scheme that will be based on the newly developed Common Readout Unit (CRU) and that will take into account particle identification and event reconstruction has to be implemented. The Electronics Research Laboratory is also fostering a close working relationship with UCT and the SA-CERN programme on the project. There are also plans to integrate some of the methodologies into the current undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.  

 

Anthony Sullivan and Dino Giovannoni from the Department of Physics and Electronics also attended a two day workshop at CERN the following week where they learnt about the new technology to be used for the CRU. 

 

There are many exciting opportunities for postgraduate research & development in cutting edge technologies. The Department is establishing a dedicated research facility for conducting specialized electronics research, particularly for science projects. 

 

Photograph: From left to right – Yves Schutz (Deputy Spokesperson for the ALICE collaboration), Tom Dietel (SA-CERN / UCT), Dino Giovannoni and Anthony Sullivan (Rhodes Department of Physics & Electronics)