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What is the specific particle detector technology used at CERN or similar Institutions. Is it essentially a big digital camera? When said particles are detected, how are they segregated, How does this physically happen? I imagine may be it is by energy, but how exactly is this achieved, are certain voltages measured, thus requiring some reverse engineering to know the associated energies? Is the improvement in detection a computational or material science problem? I would love to know the technical details if possible.

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    see a cern page –  Feb 03 '16 at 03:51
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    They are using dozens of different technologies. If you want to know how ATLAS works, this is the link to the bookshelf full of its technical design reports: https://cds.cern.ch/collection/ATLAS%20Reports?ln=en&as=1. Happy reading. There is an equivalent amount of material available for CMS etc.. Is it a digital camera? Sort of, but it's a camera into a six dimensional momentum-position space that can also distinguish particle types. – CuriousOne Feb 03 '16 at 06:40
  • To help you search, the problem goes by the name "particle identification" or "PID" in the shortest form (you also see "particle ID"). Note "PID" can also mean "proportional, integral, differential" when used in control systems, so it's value as a search term is dilluted. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Feb 03 '16 at 16:45
  • Couple of related links from around the site: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/206648/what-exactly-is-measured-in-a-e-g-hadronic-calorimeter-momentum-or-energy-of http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/34193/how-are-the-masses-of-unstable-elementary-particles-measured . We don't seem to have a general PID question yet. But then, the completely general answer is book-length. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Feb 03 '16 at 16:55
  • Electrostatic analyzers use electric fields to bend the path of charged particles to hit different anodes and solid state telescopes use pulse height analyzers of the current induced by the hole/electron created when a charge particle passes through the semiconducting wafer... – honeste_vivere Feb 11 '16 at 12:45
  • This has been quite informative. I have been going over the information. I thought I could just hack a standard digital camera, connected to a standard Arduino board to replicate on a small scale how such things work, but I think it is not quite possible. As it were some people have already done something close to this. If it were simpler, one could imagine putting something like this on a cubesat and using space as the lab. It is far more complicated and advanced than I thought. –  Feb 12 '16 at 06:20

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