GB-Swindon: UKRI-3216 Re-Install and Upgrade Alicia 4

STFC Daresbury Laboratory in collaboration with the University of York was successful in winning a project to build the silicon tracker detector for the experiment called Reactions with Relativistic Radioactive Beams (R3B). R3B is located at the international facility called Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe GmbH (FAIR GmbH)), Darmstadt (DE).

The project is planning to re-use the ALICIA-4 machine to build the silicon tracker detector for the R3B experiment.

ALICIA-4 was originally procured by the project called ALICE Inner Tracking System for CERN (2015 - 2018). This pre-cursor project was delivered as a collaboration between Daresbury Laboratory and the University of Liverpool.

ALICIA-4 is a custom-made, automated, pick-and-place machine capable of aligning detectors (i.e. electronic microchips) to an accuracy as high as 5um.

The total value of the machine at its procurement time (~2016) was ~300k EUR inc. VAT.

The deployment of the ALICIA-4 machine for the R3B detector project allowed the UK to develop a unique selling point within the R3B collaboration.

This strategic positioning benefitted from the automation and high precision capability guaranteed by the ALICIA-4 machine.

The ALICIA-4 machine needs some functional adaptation work in order to be compatible with the R3B detector layout, and to be compatible with the latest version of the Windows operative system.