CERN’s got TALENT
TALENT is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) project coordinated by CERN and funded under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme. From 23 to 25 November, the project’s participants will present their achievements at the final event that will be held at IdeaSquare.
The IBL sub-detector during its insertion in the heart of the ATLAS detector (May 2014) (Image: Heinz Pernegger/CERN).
TALENT’s acronym stands for “Training for cAreer deveLopment in high-radiation ENvironment Technologies”. Launched in 2012 by a collaboration of three research centres, seven universities and eight industrial partners and led by CERN, the project had the overall objective of building up the careers of young researchers in the field of instrumentation for future tracking detectors.
The test bed for TALENT’s students has been the development of the Insertable B-Layer (IBL) sub-detector of ATLAS. The high-precision pixel detector was installed in May 2014 and has recently started to take data. Scientists participating in TALENT were involved in the development of three different types of radiation-hard pixel sensors – 3D, planar silicon and diamond. Moreover, they helped develop the IBL’s new read-out system, as well as lighter mechanics and an innovative CO2-based cooling system. “These technological improvements are a major stepping stone for the development of the next-generation precision tracking detectors that are being designed for the HL-LHC project,” explains Heinz Pernegger, TALENT’s scientific network coordinator and former ATLAS Pixel Project leader.
Alongside the development of high-performance detector technologies, TALENT was also involved in finding industrial applications for them. By collaborating closely with economics students, the TALENT team was able to design comprehensive business plans for the most promising commercial spin-offs of these new key enabling technologies. “We came up with ideas for new industrial applications that we could use in the TALENT follow-up project, called STREAM,” adds Pernegger. Like TALENT, STREAM will be organised in the Marie Curie ITN framework and coordinated by CERN, but it will focus on the development of innovative radiation-hard, smart CMOS sensor technologies for scientific and industrial applications.
More information on the TALENT concluding event at IdeaSquare can be found here on Indico.
