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Pharisaeus t1_iwmiris wrote

Reply to comment by EchoReflection in Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science by AutoModerator

That's a complex question:

  • Charged particles passing through certain materials can induce electrical charge, so if you create a grate (lots of crossed strips, once a particle hit one you can see the voltage change) you can figure out where particle hit it. Now you can place multiple of those one after another, and this allows you to see how the particle trajectory was changing (eg. that it was curved)
  • Now you can create electrical field between those grates, you can figure out how much this electrical field is bending the particle trajectory (which is proportional to the particle momentum) and in which direction (which is related to the charge)
  • Finally you can make impenetrable shield at the very end which will completely stop the particle, and by measuring the impact you can figure out how much energy was this particle carrying.
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mfb- t1_iwnt52b wrote

> Now you can create electrical field between those grates, you can figure out how much this electrical field is bending the particle trajectory (which is proportional to the particle momentum) and in which direction (which is related to the charge)

A magnetic field.

> Finally you can make impenetrable shield at the very end which will completely stop the particle, and by measuring the impact you can figure out how much energy was this particle carrying.

Calorimeters are most important for uncharged particles (especially photons and neutral kaons) as we can't measure their energy in other ways. For charged particles the tracking system is typically more precise.

They are not the outermost detectors as muons still pass through and get detected in specialized muon chambers outside.

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