David Brand/News Service

Project Manager Chris Bebek with the plastic-encased RICH detector.

An exotic piece of apparatus that will be the heart of a detector to seek out the primordial secrets of the universe arrived at Cornell University's Wilson Laboratory July 7 after a slow 50-mile journey by refrigerated truck from Syracuse University, where it was partly assembled.

The machine consists of two nested cylinders that make up the RICH detector (for ring imaging Cerenkov counter) that will become the center of CLEO III, the $15 million particle detector upgrade housed at Wilson Lab and the primary user of the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR).

The goal of CLEO is to detect the debris that results from the collision of electron and anti-electron particles that are whirled around CESR's half-mile-circumference underground ring. In this debris are clues as to why the universe started with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter and has evolved into the matter-dominated world we know today.

Because the $7 million device is so fragile, it had to be transported at a constant speed of 25 mph to smooth out bumps. The truck was not allowed to stop on its journey and was escorted by police through traffic lights and stop signs.

"It is big, precise and very delicate," says Wilson Lab senior scientist and project manager Chris Bebek.

David Brand/News Service

An overhead view of the plastic-encased RICH detector in Wilson Lab.

The plastic-encased RICH detector, together with its packaging and steel mounting rails, weighed in at about 12,000 lbs. It was gently unloaded from the truck, rolled over to CLEO and mounted onto installation rails. Over the next few days, it will be slid into the core of CLEO that previously housed the decade-old CLEO II detector, which has been disassembled over the past few weeks.

The inner cylinder of the RICH detector is pasted with 320 tiles of lithium fluoride crystals, inserted at Southern Methodist University, that generate cones of blue light as particles pass through them. The cones of light are captured by 240,000 pixels on the outer cylinder, which was made at Syracuse University. These are read into computers to reconstruct the size of the cones, which helps identify the types of particles passing through CLEO.

The University of Minnesota and SUNY-Albany also participated in the construction of the RICH detector. In all, 20 universities have pooled their efforts to create CLEO III over the past five years.

It is hoped that the detector will be in operation by October.