A multidisciplinary team from Mexico created ACORDE, a full cosmic ray detector, and Sergio Vergara Lemon, researcher at the University of Puebla says it is the first Mexican cosmic ray detector.

ALICE is one of five experiments installed in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its function is to characterize other detectors and develop physics experiments of high energy with cosmic rays to record their passage. ALICE is made up of several screening instruments. "It's like an onion, you have a detector inside, one outside and one more, ACORDE, is all the way up," says Arturo Fernandez Tellez of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at  University of Puebla.

"ACORDE is so big that everything changes very fast and we need to modify the electronics in order to meet the needs. The team must be at the forefront of technology to solve problems that arise in these scientific challenges," says Vergara Limon.



Natural phenomena occur that can not yet be explained and the cosmic ray detector makes it possible to know these phenomena and study them with physics.

"There are particles that come from outer space, interact with the atmosphere and produce showers. When they reach the Earth they are harmless but enter with so much energy that penetrate up to 30 meters underground when they should disappear," says Vergara Limon.

Since science does not know what causes them, experiments are needed to detect where they come from and what generates them. For future work, the researchers will update ACORDE by developing a system to record the electric charge stored by captured particles by the detectors of the system. Maintenance will also be given to a subsystem by the team - the ADD (Alice Diffractive Detector), which will provide trigger signals for the study of diffractive phenomena in this experiment.