Roland Horisberger
PSI, Villigen, Switzerland
Date
16 December 2009
Host
Gianni Blatter
Title
Pixels for Beauty
Abstract
At CERN the LHC-accelerator will soon collide protons at an unprecedented energy. This will allow the detection of potentially new physics processes and the observation of so far unknown elementary particles. Swiss Institutes have built a silicon hybrid pixel detector and inserted it to form the innermost part of the 12’000 tons heavy Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. It will allow the detection of Beauty particles, emerging from the new physics processes. The conception, construction and performance of the novel pixel detector are presented together with its benefits for the physics discovery potential of the CMS experiment. The development of silicon pixel detectors has also provided an excellent tool for X-ray imaging in synchrotron experiments, which can do far more than X-ray pictures of a beautiful flower.