Large-area silica aerogel for use as Cherenkov radiators with high refractive index, developed by supercritical carbon dioxide drying

Abstract

This study presents the development of large-area (18 $\times$ 18 $\times$ 2 cm${}^3$), high refractive index ($n\sim$1.05) hydrophobic silica aerogel tiles for use as Cherenkov radiators. These transparent aerogel tiles will be installed in a Cherenkov detector for the next-generation accelerator-based particle physics experiment Belle II, to be performed at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Japan. Cracking has been eliminated from the prototype aerogel tiles by improving the supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO${}_2$) extraction procedure when drying the wet gel tiles. Finally, a method of mass-producing aerogel tiles for the actual detector was established. It was confirmed that the experimentally manufactured aerogel tiles meet the required optical and hydrophobic characteristics and have a uniform tile density.

Published in Journal of Supercritical Fluids, 14 pages, 14 figures, 3 tables

References in corpus (4)

• Recent progress in silica aerogel Cherenkov radiator
• 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
• Recent progress in the development of large area silica aerogel for use as RICH radiator in the Belle II experiment

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Performance evaluation of the aerogel RICH counter for the Belle II spectrometer using early beam collision data
• Electron-beam Calibration of Aerogel Tiles for the HELIX RICH Detector