Calorimeter for NICA collider tested in Novosibirsk using electron beams

In Novosibirsk, tests have begun on an electromagnetic calorimeter for the MPD multipurpose detector, which will be used at the NICA collider being built in Dubna. These tests are conducted by scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR).

The electromagnetic calorimeter is tested using a test electron beam, which makes it possible to simulate the operating conditions of the collider at high energies. One of the goals of the tests is to determine the limit of the calorimeter's linearity — its ability to accurately measure the energy of particles depending on their energy. This is a crucial parameter, since the NICA collider will operate at energies requiring high measurement accuracy.

The calorimeter consists of many cells, called towers, each of which consists of 210 layers of a substance that emits light when interacting with ionizing radiation. In the future, several tens of thousands of such cells will be installed on the collider detector, which may vary in size, shape, and coating quality. Each element of the calorimeter is directed to the point of ion collision, which requires bringing them to a single standard. This is why preliminary testing is necessary.

The tests are carried out on the Novosibirsk collider VEPP-4M, which is one of the few places in Russia where it is possible to generate electron beams with the required characteristics for testing detectors. According to Yuri Krechetov, a leading researcher at JINR, the main goal of these tests is to obtain an important result that will determine the limit of the calorimeter's linearity at high energies.

NICA (Nuclotron based Ion Collider fAcility) is an accelerator complex being created in Dubna to study the properties of dense baryonic matter. An important task of NICA is to recreate the quark-gluon plasma, one of the first states of matter that existed in the early Universe, just a few ten-thousandths of a second after the Big Bang. This process will require the creation of high-precision measuring instruments, one of which is the calorimeter being tested.