Next frontiers in particle physics detectors: INSTR2020 summary and a look into the future

Abstract

The physics goals of high luminosity particle accelerators, from LHC to HL-LHC and to the next generation of lepton colliders, have set quite stringent constraints on the future needs at the Instrumentation Frontier. Many technologies are reaching their sensitivity limit and new approaches need to be developed to overcome the currently irreducible technological challenges. The detrimental effect of the material budget and power consumption represents a very serious concern for a high-precision silicon vertex and tracking detectors. One of the most promising areas is CMOS sensors offering low mass and potentially radiation-hard technology for the future proton-proton and electron-positron colliders, intensity frontier and heavy-ion experiments. MPGDs have become a well-established technique in the fertile field of gaseous detectors; these will remain the primary choice whenever the large-area coverage with low material budget is required. Vacuum tube technology is inherently fast and new developments include advances in microchannel plates for photomultipliers with a potential for a picosecond-time resolution in large systems. Several novel concepts of picosecond-timing detectors will have numerous powerful applications in particle identification, pile-up rejection and event reconstruction, and serve numerous scientific goals. The story of modern calorimetry is a textbook example of physics research driving the development of an experimental method. Silicon photomultipliers have seen a rapid progress in the last decade, becoming the standard solution for scintillator-based devices. The integration of advanced electronics and data transmission functionalities plays an increasingly important role and needs to be addressed. Bringing the modern algorithmic advances from the field of machine learning from offline applications to online operations and trigger systems is another major challenge. The timescales spanned by future projects in particle physics, ranging from few years to many decades, constitute a challenge in itself, in addition to the complexity and diversity of the required accelerator and detector R&D. This paper summarizes advances and recent trends in the instrumentation techniques for particle physics experiments, largely based on the presentations given at the International Conference “Instrumentation for Colliding Beam Physics” (INSTR-20), held at BINP Novosibirsk, Russia, from 24 to 28 February, 2020.