Tuesday 18 February 2020

Visiting South African plant for production of electronics for the European Laboratory CERN

Today a Wits team from the High-throughput electronics laboratory within the Institute for Collider Particle Physics visited Jemstech. This electronics  plant has populated the electronics boards for the first prototype made in South Africa of the Low Voltage Power Supplies (LVPS) for the upgraded Tile Calorimeter of the ATLAS Detector at CERN. The LVPS will power the future on-detector electronics of the Tile Calorimeter that is being designed for the Phase-II upgrade of this detector. South Africa is responsible for the production of over 1000 of these boards, where the PCBs are manufactured in Trax, Cape Town and passed to Jemstech for population.

The Wits team in charge of the South African production is composed of Edward Nkadimeng, Nkhosiphendule Njara, Thabo Lepota, Ryan McKenzie, Charles Sandrock, Roger van Rensburg and Bruce Mellado.

The purpose of the visit is to discuss the production of the second and close-to-final prototype of the LVPS. We discussed quality control issues, details of the bill of materials and other components. Discussed the implementation of Artificial Intelligence in the process of quality control assessment.

Chatted with the Managing Director of Jemstech who was upbeat about his plant. Jemstech delivers commissions for Airbus and will enhance its production capabilities by 600% in July.











Friday 10 January 2020

Student support for joint Astro-Particle, Radio Astronomy and Collider Particle Physics research

The Wits Centre for Astrophysics and the Institute for Collider Particle Physics are developing joint projects to understand anomalies in Astro-Physics, the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments. Projects revolve around the study of Dark Matter, additional Bosons and other degrees of freedom that can can give a compact explanation to the above mentioned anomalies, while providing predictions for the SKA, CTA and future collider facilities around the world. Projects include the use of computational and Artificial Intelligence techniques. 

The student support comprises a bursary and travel funding. 

Prospective candidates should send an application package comprised of a letter of motivation, CV and transcripts, before February 10th 2020.

Prof. Andrew Chen, Director, Centre for Astrophysics, andrew.chen@wits.ac.za
Prof. Bruce Mellado, Director, Institute for Collider Particle Physics, bruce.mellado@wits.ac.za