Ivan Chernyshev Rose Hills
Construction and Testing the New MAPS Pixel Chips for the ALICE ITS
The ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN collides lead nuclei and observes the particles ejected from the collision to study quark-gluon plasma, a highly energetic state of matter that existed during the first microsecond after the Big Bang. ALICEs current systems have been successful in measuring a variety of aspects of quark-gluon plasma, but they are unable to produce the resolution and statistics necessary to observe every aspect of quark-gluon plasma or observe particles of all momenta. To reduce this limitation, the Large Hadron Collider will be upgraded during its 2018-2019 shutdown. The LHCs beam will be increased in intensity to provide more particles for statistics. To keep up with this increase, and to increase the detection resolution, ALICEs internal tracking system, which tracks the trajectories of charged particles subjected to a magnetic field, will be refitted with the new MAPS detector pixels, which have a higher resolution and detection rate, as well as a lower material cost, than current detectors. I will be building and testing boards of these chips.
Message To Sponsor
Dear Rose Hills Foundation: Thank you so much for your support of my SURF Rose Hills Experience project. Thanks to your gracious support, I was able to pay the costs of living in Berkeley for the duration of my summer, as well as participating in a program where I interacted and exchanged ideas with other people from various disciplines. This experience broadened my horizons and exposed me to a variety of research options in which I could participate in the future, as well as providing me with a rewarding research experience in high-energy physics.