Sustainable Physics: SciBooNE's Recycling

Fermilab's daily newsletter, Fermilab Today, has recently published a nice article about SciBooNE. (Read it here!) The article discusses an interesting aspect of our experiment, which is that many of our detector components have been recycled from previous experiments. Our vertex detector (SciBar) and electromagnetic calorimeter (EC) both came to us from Japan where they were used very successfully in the K2K neutrino oscillation experiment. Actually, the EC originally was used in the CHORUS neutrino oscillation experiment at CERN, so it has been recycled twice---very good value for money! The third part of the detector is the muon range detector (MRD) which is made from iron and scintillators originally from the Fermilab hadron spectroscopy experiment E-605. (The photo above shows Joe cleaning some of the scintillators. [Photo courtesy of Fermilab Visual Media Services.]) We also used PMTs from a half dozen or more sources for the MRD. (The photo at left shows Hannah Newfield-Plunkett, an undergrad summer student from Cornell working on sorting out PMTs for the MRD.) We also used electronics for the readout of our PMTs and the data acquisition from the Fermilab equipment pool, PREP. This group at the lab is an enormously valuable resource and we really couldn't have built the experiment so quickly and inexpensively without them. To connect the recycled PMTs to the PREP electronics we also needed to find as many quality cables as possible because they are not cheap! We sorted through many thousands of old cables to find what we could use; they were stored in an old experimental hall which is now a kind of physics graveyard full of lots of old but still valuable and very useful equipment. The photo at right shows Michel Sorel and Joan Catala, both from Valencia University, sorting and testing cables. It was hot and dirty work!

The Fermilab Today article discusses all this work and more, and includes an audio interview with Joe. Check it out!