During the fifth annual ALICE Industrial Awards ceremony, the ALICE Collaboration honoured Fibernet for outstanding contributions to the construction of the experiment.

For the past five years, the ALICE collaboration has been presenting its industrial partners with awards for meeting demanding or unusual requirements, for excellence in design or execution, for delivery on-time and on-budget and for outstanding cooperation. This year, on 9 March, ALICE presented awards to Fibernet for exceptional performance.

 

FIBERNET Ltd., based in Yokneam, Israel, was rewarded for the excellent and timely assembly of the Silicon Strip Detector boards (SSD) of the Inner Tracking System with cable connections. Special low-mass cables, a mere millimetre across in diameter, connect the inner parts of the Silicon Strip Detector to the outside world. The combination of both normal -sized power wires and two types of shielded twisted pairs makes the assembly challenging enough, but due to the limited space at the very heart of ALICE, it was required that the assembly had no twist between the three sets of conductors. Assembly tests, performed in various laboratories, showed that this was difficult to achieve. FIBERNET, however, created assemblies of cables that were supple and could easily be laid in any desired curve. Although these are relatively small cables, the assembly was no small task: the cables contain a total number of 25000 wires amounting to a total length of 80 km.