The chipmaker’s two silicon technologies -sensors and voltage regulators- were built into two key instruments of CERN’s Large Hardon Collider, or LHC, the world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator.
CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced on July 4 that it has observed clear sign of a new particle at the level of 5 sigma in its preliminary result for a discovery of Higgs boson.
The Franco-Italy joint-venture chip maker’s silicon sensors were used with CMS, Compact Muon Solenoid, a particle detector.
Built with its ultra-high precision silicon sensors, the CMS is a machine is to observe how protons collide to convert the collision energy into particles of finite mass, offering a glimpse of how matter came into existence after the Bing Bang.
STMicroelectronics has supplied many thousands of silicon sensors since 2002, delivering on the requirements that call for extremely high accuracy and purity at a die size 100 times larger than a conventional chip die.
For the ATLAS detector, the company developed unique radiation-hardened positive and negative voltage regulators to be used in the liquid argon calorimeter electronics, the pixel detector, transition-radiation tracking detector, and other sub-systems.
STMicroelectronics received a 2006 ATLAS Supplier Award for producing the regulators after ATLAS scientists found no existing devices capable of delivering sufficient current reliably when exposed to very high levels of radiation. The same technology has been used by STMicroelectronics to support the satellite and aerospace segments for several years. In addition to the voltage regulators, ST has supplied over 40,000 rad-hard diodes to ATLAS.
“This has been a multinational effort, involving many thousands of people, to build the equipment, collect and process data, and validate the results,” said Carmela Papa, executive vice president and general manager of the Industrial and Multisegment Sector with STMicroelectronics.
“It has been rewarding for us to have played a part, however small, in this important project revealing crucial truths about the nature of the universe and ourselves,” added he.
Results presented by the CMS and ATLAS teams of CERN appear to be a new particle consistent with a Higgs boson, having a mass of around 125 GeV.
Validation of the results suggests there is only a one in 3.5 million chance that the observation is the result of a statistical fluke, rather than the existence of a real particle.
The existence of a Higgs boson (as the quantum particle associated with the Higgs field, in the same way the photon is the quantum particle associated with an electromagnetic field) was predicted in the 1960s by the theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.
The Higgs field and boson are key aspects of a mechanism developed by scientists to explain observations that challenge the Standard Model of particle physics, which is today’s most accurate theory describing the fundamental particles making up all matter in the universe and the effects of the Electromagnetic, Weak and Strong forces acting on them.
Earlier experiments in the LHC have confirmed the Standard Model to within 1%, but the Higgs boson has remained unseen until now. “This is a historical milestone, but only the beginning,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer, concluding that this was a global effort and a global success, with global implications for the future.