Thermal conductivity of diamond-loaded glues for the ATLAS particle physics detector

The ATLAS experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. ATLAS has been collecting data from the collisions of protons since December 2009, in order to investigate the conditions that existed during the early Universe and the origins of mass, and other topics in fundamental particle physics. The innermost layers of the ATLAS detector will be exposed to the most radiation over the first few years of operation at the LHC. In particular, the layer closest to the beam pipe, the B-layer, will degrade over time due to the added radiation. To compensate for its degradation, it will be replaced with an Insertable B-Layer (IBL) around 2016. The design of and R&D for the IBL is ongoing, as the hope is to use the most current technologies in the building of this new sub-detector layer. One topic of interest is the use of more thermally conductive glues in the construction of the IBL, in order to facilitate in the dissipation of heat from the detector. In this paper the measurement and use of highly thermally conductive glues, in particular those that are diamond-loaded, will be discussed. The modified transient plane source technique for thermal conductivity is applied in characterizing the glues across a wide temperature range.