CMS Honours Three Russian and Bielorussian companies

On 7 March, CMS handed out the three latest Gold Awards under its scheme for honouring its best suppliers suppliers (c.f. Bulletin n°10/2003). Three Russian and Bielorussian firms were honoured, on the occasion of a visit by dignitaries from the two countries.
CERN played host to Anatoly Sherbak, Head of the Fundamental Research Department of the Russian Federation Ministry of Industry and Science, Ambassador Sergei Aleinik, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Belarus to the Office of the United Nations at Geneva, Andrei Pirogov, Assistant Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the Office of the United Nations, and Alexei Sissakian, Vice Director of the JINR (Joint Institute for Nuclear Research) at Dubna in Russia.


The directors of the three Russian and Bielorussian firms have received their awards and are seen with the visiting Russian and Bielorussian dignitaries and the CMS leaders in front of the CMS hadron calorimeter, on the spot where the detector is being assembled.

These prominent guests were present when the awards were made to the directors of the Russian firms ENTEK and the Myasishchev Design Bureau, and the Bielorussian company MZOR. The various aspects of the work were coordinated in CMS by the RDMS (Russia Dubna Member States) group. As CMS begins the active phase, assembling and installing its sub-detectors, the management of the collaboration wanted to single out the remarkable achievements of Russian and Bielorussian industries.
MZOR and ENTEK designed, produced and assembled the mechanical parts for the CMS hadron calorimeter end-caps. The MZOR machine tools company fabricated the absorber plates and interfaces, weighing as much as 600 tonnes, to a very high degree of precision. The firm has also produced special assembly tooling. In addition, ENTEK manufactured components for the calorimeter and took responsibility for its final assembly at CERN.
The Myasishchev company was responsible for the carbon fibre structures in which the fragile lead tungstate crystals of the electromagnetic calorimeter end-caps are to be embedded. These lightweight structures must support a weight of 22.9 tonnes in each end-cap! All the difficulty lay in the need to produce a very thin-walled modular structure to ensure the calorimeter performance would not be harmed, while remaining stable and strong. Not only did this firm succeed in doing so but it also achieved performances better than those expected. For example, most of the alveoles have walls that are no thicker than 0.3 and 0.4 millimetres yet support 25 crystals, requiring support for a total weight of 39 kilos!