Design, fabrication and packaging expertise extends to very large scientific instruments

Leti has created what is claimed to be the world’s first microfluidic circuit for cooling a particle detector, maybe showing the way to a revolutionary, new detector technique at the Large Hadron Collider. This cooling system is part of CERN’s NA62 Gigatracker, a silicon pixel detector used to measure the arrival time and the position of incoming beam particles in the world’s largest particle accelerator. The detector is designed to investigate the “very rare” decay of kaons, subatomic particles made of quarks. Learning these decays will help physicists check some of the predictions that the Standard Model of particle physics makes about short-distance interactions. Specifically, NA62 will measure the rate at which the charged kaon decays into a charged pion and a neutrino-antineutrino pair. The Standard Model of particle physics explains how the basic building blocks of matter interact, governed by four fundamental forces in nature: gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. “The very rare decay of Kaons is sensitive to contributions coming from new particles and therefore represents a powerful way of searching for new physics,” said Augusto Ceccucci, NA62 spokesperson. “This technique complements the direct approach of the LHC detectors, and is a key component in CERN’s programs to probe the ultimate constituents of matter and understand the laws of nature.”