Optical and radiographical characterization of silica aerogel for Cherenkov radiator

Abstract

We present optical and X-ray radiographical characterization of silica aerogels with refractive index from 1.05 to 1.07 for a Cherenkov radiator. A novel pin-drying method enables us to produce highly transparent hydrophobic aerogels with high refractive index by shrinking wet-gels. In order to investigate the uniformity in the density (i.e., refractive index) of an individual aerogel monolith, we use the laser Fraunhofer method, an X-ray absorption technique, and Cherenkov imaging by a ring imaging Cherenkov detector in a beam test. We observed an increase in density at the edge of the aerogel tiles, produced by pin-drying.

To be published in IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., 7 pages, 9 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (3)

• Development of transparent silica aerogel over a wide range of densities
• Hydrophobic silica aerogel production at KEK
• Recent progress in silica aerogel Cherenkov radiator

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Developing a silica aerogel radiator for the HELIX ring-imaging Cherenkov system
• Silica aerogel radiator for use in the A-RICH system utilized in the Belle II experiment
• X-ray radiographic technique for measuring density uniformity of silica aerogel
• Progress in development of silica aerogel for particle- and nuclear-physics experiments at J-PARC
• Transparent tiles of silica aerogels for high-energy physics