Layer 7: Muon Detectors
The final "layer" of the detector consists of the muon detectors. Muons are charged particles that may be produced when heavy particles decay. These high-energy particles hardly interact so the muon detectors are strategically placed at the farthest layer from the beam pipe behind large walls of steel. The steel ensures that only extremely high-energy particles, such as neutrinos and muons, pass through to the muon chambers. There are two aspects of the muon detectors: the planar drift chambers and scintillators. There are four layers of planar drift chambers, each with the capability of detecting muons with a transverse momentum PT>1.4GeV/c. These drift chambers work in the same way as the COT. They are filled with gas and wire. The charged muons ionize the gas and the signal is carried to readout by the wires.
Understanding the different components of the detector is important because the detector determines what data will look like and what signal one can expect to see for each of your particles. It is important to remember that a detector is basically a set of obstacles used to force particles to interact, allowing physicists to “see” the presence of a certain particle. If a charged quark is passing through the detector, the evidence of this quark will be a curved trajectory in the silicon detector and COT deposited energy in the calorimeter. If a neutral particle, such as a neutron, passes through the detector, there will be no track in the COT and silicon detector but deposited energy in the hadronic calorimeter. Muons may appear in the COT and silicon detector and as deposited energy in the muon detectors. Likewise, a neutrino, which rarely if ever interacts, will express itself only in the form of missing energy.
Read more about this topic: Collider Detector At Fermilab
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