Micro-channel cooling for high-energy physics particle detectors and electronics

Abstract

Micro-channel cooling is gaining considerable attention as an alternative technique for cooling of High-Energy Physics (HEP) detectors and Front-End (FE) electronics. This technology is being evaluated for future tracking devices, where material budget limitations are a major concern. It has been approved as the baseline for the local thermal management of the NA62 GigaTracKer (GTK) silicon pixel detector, where a micro-fabricated silicon cooling plate would stand directly in the beam. Other possible applications are also being studied in the context of detectors upgrades for the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In this paper, the current status of this R&D at CERN is presented.

Vertically Integrated System with Microfabricated 3D Sensors and CO2 Microchannel Cooling

“…Microfabricated channels have also shown to be interesting for circulation of cooling fluids. Attempts in this respect have been successful in power managing microprocessors and latter in high energy physics experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider's experiments aiming at pushing research discoveries by precision measurements of the particles' trajectories [7][8][9][10]. The ATLAS experiment used 3D silicon sensors for the first time in the Insertable B-Layer (IBL), which was installed in 2012 and successfully collected data, together with innovative planar sensors since 2014 [11].…”

Evaporative CO2 cooling using microchannels etched in silicon for the future LHCb vertex detector

“…Large temperature gradients across the cooling plate are avoided, and a mismatch of the coefficient of thermal expansion between the heat source (silicon sensors and ASICs) and heat sink, is suppressed. This integrated approach is very attractive for high energy physics and is being pursued in a number of domains [4] [5]. This paper describes the LHCb approach, which is to integrate the microchannel cooling together with two-phase CO 2 as the coolant, thus providing a convenient and radiation hard method to cool the silicon and ASICs to below -20 o C over the whole module surface.…”

Silicon microchannel frames for high-energy physics experiments

“…A microchannel cooling system is usually composed of a number of parallel channels of micrometer size where the cooling fluid runs through. This technology has raised considerable interest in the last decade for the thermal management of electronics devices [1]. Benefiting from the incredible progress of microfabrication technologies in recent years, microchannel cooling plates can be fabricated to feature microscopic parallel channels in very thin and light substrates.…”