Round Two for Three ALICE Industrial Awards

After the ALICE award ceremony (from left to right): Yuri Saveliev, Stanislav Burachas and Sergei Beloglovsky, of North Crystals; Maximilian Metzger, CERN's Secretary-General; Rang Cai of ATM; Jürgen Schukraft, ALICE spokesperson; Erich Pamminger and Daniel Gattinger of FACC; and Tiejun Wang of ATM.

One award winner is Advanced Technology and Materials (ATM), a young, privately-held Chinese company headquartered in Beijing, an offspring of a previously state-supported network of research institutes specializing in materials science. ATM has emerged as a leader in advanced materials such as tungsten alloys and refractive metals. They won a contract with ALICE to produce a variety of complex absorber parts fabricated from a high-density tungsten alloy. These parts, totalling more than seven tonnes, are the heart of a finely-tuned muon filter which has the task of absorbing thousands of hadrons produced in each LHC lead-lead collision, while only minimally disturbing the tell-tale muons emitted from quark-gluon matter. These pieces, located in the centre of the 15-metre-long muon spectrometer, had to be built with sub-millimetre precision in complex, interlocking shapes surrounding the delicate beam pipe of the collider: a true example of a "Chinese puzzle". The company was honoured for their outstanding collaboration, innovative technology, and on-time and to-specification delivery.

Fischer Advanced Composite Components (FACC) is also a young company, located in Upper Austria. For several years they have been a major manufacturer of composite parts for some of the biggest airplane builders. Recognizing the need for constant R&D, FACC has a unit dedicated to custom work. They won the partnership with ALICE to develop and manufacture the parts forming the cylindrical hull ("Field Cage") of the ALICE Time Projection Chamber, the world's largest, with a volume of nearly 100 cubic metres. The physics program requires that these detector enclosures represent "no" material that would disturb the "delicate" particles to be detected in the TPC. FACC developed and constructed these panels, which were made into 5-metre-long, 5-metre-diameter cylinders with sub-millimetre precision, to support tonnes of forces with essentially no deformation. Again, recognition was given for a successful completion of this unique project; it required a perfect match between CERN engineering competence and an enterprising, creative, high-tech company, willing to take risks and to explore novel avenues.

North Crystals, located in Apatity near Murmansk, Russia, was the third company selected for an ALICE Industry Award. It is also a young company, which successfully made the transition from a state-owned institute of the former Soviet Union to a world leader in advanced crystal technology. In a very short time this company has evolved into an ultra-modern establishment. The large halls are now filled with hundreds of gleaming, computer-controlled crystal-growing facilities. Among the spectrum of crystals developed and produced for telecommunication, medical imagery, and consumer electronics, North Crystals has also developed—in close collaboration with the Kurtchatov Institute, Moscow—crystals for state-of-the-art electromagnetic calorimeters. Already a key technology in LEP experiments, the more demanding applications at LHC required novel crystal technology, "crystallized" in the form of a lead-tungsten compound, PbWO4. The visual beauty of these crystals is only surpassed by the spectacular quality of their measurement properties. The same technology is also used on a considerably larger scale by CMS. North Crystals was honoured for their remarkably successful collaboration and development of these crystals, presently being assembled into the ALICE "PHOS" calorimeter.

CERN's Secretary General, Maximilian Metzger, in his remarks to conclude the award ceremony, pointed to the common denominator of these three companies: young, dynamic, high-tech, recognizing the importance of R&D and the potential leverage resulting from collaborating with leading research organizations. These three leaders in advanced, modern materials were honoured with the ALICE awards, beautifully sculptured from one of the oldest materials used by mankind to manufacture tools: Mexican obsidian. The awards were a token of recognition of the considerable efforts expended by these companies to contribute to ALICE's arsenal of instrumentation and to speed ALICE along on their LHC expedition to the origins of our Universe.