As parents think about a name for a new baby, experimentalists give their experiments names. Very often one finds unpronounceable 3-letter names, but sometimes particle physics collaborations find nice names, such as ZEUS or ATLAS (ok, I am biased here 😉 ). Also smaller devices or subsystems get a name, giving us the possibility to speak in a terrible slang outsiders don’t understand anymore. Some of my colleagues are real masters in speaking this slang making sure, that not only outsiders do not understand them.
In the recent years I realized that also my first name, Ingrid, ended up in the community as name for different devices. And this can actually lead to very funny situations. For example a more recent idea to read this micro pattern gas detectors (MPGD) with a pixel anode. In order to accurately control the alignment of the grid geometry, the integration of the MPGD amplification and the pixel chip is done by means of ’wafer post-processing’ technique. With this technology, the structure of thin (1 μm) aluminum grid is fabricated on top of an array of insulating pillars of typically 50 μm height, which stand above the pixel chip. This forms then an integrated readout of the gaseous detector. This technology is called Integrated Grid – abbreviated as InGrid.
Whenever I listen to a talk where these integrated grids are discussed, I have to smile. For example the InGrid experts like to show the behavior of the system at different high voltages and then discuss “Ingrid at 400V” versus “Ingrid at 600V”. The thought of being tested at these high voltages is not very appealing, but the InGrids they talk about seem to be fine with that.
Another device, also called Ingrid, is a scintillator subsystem of the ND280 detector at T2K, a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment in Japan. In this system Ingrid is consisting of 16 modules interleaved with iron. So this is a rather big device. Two years back I was at a conference where somehow a presentation about this rather big device slipped into a session about micro pattern gas detectors (as described above); the convener probably had so many talks with “InGrid” in the title, he misplaced the talk about the neutrino facility. The poor speaker! He had to present this completely out of topic presentation in front of tracking people (tracking detectors are usually comparable small and light weight). Everybody knew that this is the wrong session and we were already slightly amused. And then the speaker said “Ingrid weighs 7 tons”, so all my friends and myself started to laugh. And the speaker had no clue what he said to make us laugh.
