Future Perspectives for the Application of Low Temperature Detectors in Heavy Ion Physics

Abstract

Calorimetric low temperature detectors have the potential to become powerful tools for applications in many fields of heavy ion physics. A brief overview of heavy ion physics is given, and the next generation heavy ion facility FAIR is described with a special emphasis on the potential advantage of Low Temperature Detectors (LTDs) for applications in heavy ion physics. For prototype LTDs for the energy sensitive detection of heavy ions excellent results with respect to energy resolution down to ▵E/E = 1–2×10−3 for a wide range of incident energies, and with respect to other detector properties, such as energy linearity with no indication of pulse height defects even for the heaviest ions, have been obtained. In addition, prototype detectors for hard X‐rays have shown energy resolutions down to ▵E = 30–40eV @ 60 keV. Consequently, both detector schemes have already been successfully used for first experiments. At present, the design and setup of large solid angle detector arrays is in progress. With the al...