thasti

There's a variety of places - on Earth and beyond - that pose challenging conditions to the ever-shrinking digital circuits of today. Making those tiny transistors work reliably when bombarded with charged particles in the vacuum of space, in the underground tunnels of CERN or in your local hospital's X-ray machine is not an easy feat. This talk is going to shed some light on what can be done to keep particles from messing up your ones and zeroes, how errors in digital circuits can be detected and corrected, and how you may even re-purpose those flipped bits in your RAM as a particle detector.

This talk will introduce the audience to the class of problems that digital circuits are faced with in challenging radiation environments. Such environments include satellites in space, the electronics inside particle accelerators and also a variety of medical applications. After giving an overview of the various effects that may cause malfunctions, different techniques for detection and mitigation of such effects are presented. Some of these techniques concern the transistor-level design of digital circuits, others include triple modular redundancy (TMR) and correction codes. Some open source software solutions that aid in the design and verification of circuits hardened against such problems are presented, and of course a 'lessons learned' from our experiences in the field of particle detector electronics will be shared.

Other people: Szymon

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the biggest particle accelerator on Earth. It was built to study matter in more detail than ever before and prove physical theories like the Standard Model of Particle Physics. This talk will focus on the engineering aspects of LHC. How was it built? What makes it tick? Which technologies are needed to create a such powerful machine? This talk will take you on a journey to explore how the most complex machine ever built by humans works.

During previous CCCs, several talks described what kind of data the experiments of LHC look out for, how the data is stored, how physicists are analysing data and how they extract their huge discoveries. Often times though, the presence of the particle accelerator itself is taken for granted in light of these findings. That's why this talk will give an in-depth engineering summary about that 'particle accelerator'. We'll shed light on the big technology and engineering problems that had to be solved before being able to build a machine that we take for granted these days. Among other things, we will describe how to cool down several thousand tons of magnets to -271.25°C, how to safely dissipate ~500 MegaJoule of energy in just a fraction of a second, or how to bend a beam of particles around a corner while it's moving along with ~99,9999991% of the speed of light. Of course, we'll also touch on the bits that make collecting the data gathered in all the physics detectors possible in the first place.

Other people: sev