NTU to Become the International Production Center of New Particle Detectors

Taiwan Silicon Detector Facility (TSiDF), funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, has been officially launched in National Taiwan University’s Astronomy-Mathematics Building in March, 2019. The research team of TSiDF consists of researchers from National Taiwan University (NTU), National Central University (NCU), the Academia Sinica, National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), and National Cheng Kung University (NCKU). The team is co-led by Prof. Stathes Paganis (裴思達) and Prof. Rong-Shyang Lu (呂榮祥) from the Department of Physics at NTU, Prof. Chia-Ming Kuo (郭家銘) from the Department of Physics at NCU, and Researcher Suen Hou (侯書雲) from the Institute of Physics at the Academia Sinica.

TSiDF includes robotic arms fitted with visual field function and offers programmable wire bonding services. The facility has been designated as the production base of the next generation CMS High Granularity Calorimeter (CMS discovered Higgs boson in 2012) by CMS Experiment at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research); and 5000 sensor models to be produced byTSiDF have been scheduled. Students and researchers at NTU are cooperating with students and scientists from other institutions to produce the first prototype sensor with all components made in Taiwan.

Twenty scientists from Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), Japan's largest comprehensive research institution, Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in the US, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) visited TSiDF on March 26, 2019. Afterwards, these scientists expressed their fervent hope that TSiDF could produce tracking devices for BNL’s sPHENIX experiment.

Prof. Stathes Paganis, the initiator of the program, has pointed out that producing core detector components for some of the most prominent research teams in the world is simply unprecedented in Taiwan, where is also the base for the entire production process. Taiwan’s skills and technical levels are now at par with, if not better than, our long-term competitors, including the US, the UK, China, and India. More importantly, with the silicon detector facility, there is no longer a need to invest all our manpower and funding on foreign laboratories when participating in international cooperation. We can use the funding in Taiwan and recruit outstanding talents and companies to research, develop as well as produce these detectors. In this way, we would be able to keep the skills and jobs in Taiwan, and even further apply the skills to develop new devices for industrial and medical purposes.

For more information, please visit “Taiwan Silicon Detector Facility (TSiDF)” website at https://hep1.phys.ntu.edu.tw/~paganis/