• Question: Is the camars that you work with REALLY big, and how much power dose it use?=)

    Asked by Bertsie =) to Flavia on 10 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Flavia de Almeida Dias

      Flavia de Almeida Dias answered on 10 Nov 2015:

      Hello! 🙂

      I work at the ATLAS experiment at CERN, which is a particle detector, which works very similar to a very fancy, big and expensive camera.

      ATLAS is about 45 meters long, more than 25 meters high, and weighs about 7,000 tons. It is about half as big as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and weighs the same as the Eiffel Tower or a hundred 747 jets (empty).

      It consists of several layers of different materials and different functions – each layer specialised in detecting a different kind of particle, or aspect of the same particle. The innermost part is what we call a “tracker” – is records the trajectories of charged particles which passes through it. The next layer is what we call “calorimeters” – it is made of materials which will stop an incoming particle, and in the process measures how much energy it had when it reached that detector layer. The outermost part is a “muon detector”, which is designed specially to tell us of the presence of a particle called muon, which is the heavy brother of the electron. All of these detector bits are immersed in a magnetic field, which will help us with the measurements by bending the charged particles when they cross our camera.

      CERN is the laboratory in the border of Switzerland and France hosting the Large Hadron Collider, which produces the data that not only the ATLAS detector, but also CMS, ALICE, LHCb experiments analyse. CERN uses 1.3 terawatt hours of electricity annually. That’s enough power to fuel 300,000 homes for a year in the United Kingdom. But the energy needed changes from month to month, as the seasons shift and the experimental requirements are adjusted.

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