High-quality aerogel Cherenkov radiators recently developed in Japan

Abstract

Around 1980, Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, also known as the KEK laboratory, began developing silica aerogels as a Cherenkov radiator. In 1996, the high energy physics group at Chiba University, Japan, began aerogel research and development in collaborating with KEK. The design of state-of-the-art Cherenkov detectors is enabled by improving aerogel transparency. Simultaneously, ultrahigh- and ultralow-refractive-index aerogels were developed to bridge the gap in the available indices for identifying low- and high-momentum particles, respectively. These are and will be employed in ongoing and future particle physics experiments all over the world. We report the latest results from the aerogel development and applications to threshold-type and ring-imaging Cherenkov detectors.