The Advanced European Infrastructures for Detectors and Accelerators (AIDA-2020) – the largest European-funded project for joint detector development – is making financial support available for small development teams to carry out experiments and tests at one of 10 participating European facilities. The project, which started on 1 May, will run for four years. Its main goal is to bring the community together and push detector technologies beyond current limits by sharing high-quality infrastructures provided by 57 partners from 34 countries, from Europe to Asia.
Building on the experience gained with the original AIDA project (CERN Courier April 2011 p6), the transnational access (TA) activities in AIDA-2020 are to enable financial support for teams to travel from one facility to another, to share existing infrastructures for efficient and reliable detector development. The support is organized around three different themes, providing access to a range of infrastructures: the Proton Synchrotron and Super Proton Synchrotron test beams, the IRRAD proton facility and the Gamma Irradiation Facility (GIF++) at CERN; the DESY II test beam; the TRIGA reactor at the Jožef Stefan Institute; the Karlsruhe Compact Cyclotron (KAZ); the Centre de Recherches du Cyclotron at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain); the MC40 Cyclotron at the University of Birmingham; the Rudjer Boskovic Institute Accelerator Facility (RBI-AF); and the electromagnetic compatibility facility (EMClab) at the Instituto Tecnológico de Aragón (ITAINNOVA).
Access to high-energy particle beams (TA1) at CERN and DESY enables the use of test beams free-of-charge. Here the main goal is to attract more researchers to participate in beam tests, in particular supporting PhD students and postdoctoral researchers to carry out beam tests of detectors.
With the access to irradiation sources (TA2), the goal is to cover the range of particle sources needed for detector qualification for the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) project. These include proton, neutron and mixed-field sources, as well as gamma irradiation. Through IRRAD, TRIGA, KAZ and MC40, it provides both the extreme fluences of up to 1017 neq/cm2 required for the forward region in HL-LHC experiments, and the lower fluences of 1015 neq/cm2 on 10 cm2 objects for the outer layers of trackers. GIF++ covers irradiation of large-scale objects such as muon chambers, while the Heavy Ion Irradiation Facility at UCLouvain is available for single-event-effects tests of electronics.
The third theme provides access to new detector-testing facilities (TA3). Semiconductor detectors will be one of the main challenges at the HL-LHC. Studying their behaviour with micro-ion beams at RBI will enhance the understanding of these detectors. Electromagnetic compatibility is a key issue when detectors have to be integrated in an experiment, and prior tests in a dedicated facility such as the EMClab at ITAINNOVA will make the commissioning of detectors more efficient.
• For more details on each facility and eligibility criteria, visit aida2020.web.cern.ch/content/transnational-access.
