Studies on Cooling of the TOTEM Particle Detector at the LHC

TOTEM is an experiment at the CERN LHC collider to measure the total pp cross section and elastic scattering of protons. For the detection of the elastically scattered particles at very small angles with respect to the beams edgeless silicon detectors will be contained in 36 small vacuum vessels called “roman pots” to be installed inside the LHC beam vacuum pipe. The final -not yet fixed-operating temperature is expected to be between 130 K and 220 K. The preferred cooling method applies a combination of cryogenic heat pipes and pulse tube refrigerators.