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Erik Heijne with Orhan Nalcioglu |
The 1999 Merit Award of the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society was presented to Erik Heijne from CERN on 26 October at the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium held in Seattle. The citation is: “For vision and leadership in applying silicon technologies to the development of new and important detector systems for High Energy Physics”.
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Erik Heijne with Orhan Nalcioglu |
Erik has been at CERN since 1973, first working on the silicon detectors for the neutrino beam monitoring system. In 1980 he introduced the silicon microstrip detector which by now has become standard instrumentation in most particle physics experiments. While the idea of a linearly segmented silicon diode originated apparently in the Philips Research Labs in Amsterdam around 1963 (“checker board” detector) the advances in silicon technology allowed a fresh approach in particle physics. In particular, the use of miniaturized electronic readouts, as first designed at CERN by Pierre Jarron, made it possible to employ systems with thousands of strips. The first microstrip detectors in 1980 still used the surface barrier technology, but soon ion implantation technology became practical thanks to the work of Joseph Kemmer in Munich and the subsequent commercialization by Enertec in Strasbourg, Micron in Southampton and Hamamatsu in Japan. Around 1990 the further advances in CMOS chip technology and interconnection techniques allowed the construction of the first silicon “micropattern pixel detector” for high speed ionizing particle tracking. This “micropattern” matrix incorporates a complete signal processor with amplifier, shaper, discriminator, counter, etc. ( with now up to 1000 transistors!) in each of several thousand cells. The “micropattern pixel detector” should be distinguished from charge-integrating pixellated devices like CCDs or older versions of imaging pixel detectors. The latter contain at most 2 or 3 switching transistors in each cell, or no transistor at all, as in a CCD. An array of “micropattern” devices allows position and eventually pattern reconstruction in 3 dimensions with micrometer precision at the nanosecond level, for unrelated images at frequencies currently as high as 50 MHz. Erik and his group of engineers in the CERN-LAA project tested the first really functional pixel detector in particle beams at the PS and the SPS at CERN in Geneva, and the earliest publications appeared at the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium in 1989 and 1991.
Radiation sensitivity will be an important aspect of future detector systems in particle experiments, due to the much increased intensity of the background radiation. Greatly helped by the contacts with professionals in the field of radhard electronics in the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society it has been possible for Erik also to contribute to this aspect of the instrumentation. In particular, an intelligent use of deep submicron CMOS proves to be very effective for the “micropattern pixel” readout chip.
The first NPSS Merit Award was presented in 1972 to W.A. Higinbotham from the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Dr Erik Heijne is only the second European to receive the award. The first, in 1988, was Professor Emilio Gatti from the Polytechnic University in Milan, Italy.
Erik Heijne has served as an elected NPSS Ad Com member, as well as Society Vice President. He can be reached at the EP Division, CERN, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland; Phone: +41 22 767-3946; Fax: +41 22 767-3394; E-mail: heijne@cern.ch.