Reducing the Greenhouse Gas Usage from Particle Detection Systems: Status and Perspectives

The gaseous particle detector community is nowadays facing the problem of minimizing usage and, in the long term, finding replacement for fluorinated gases used in several detector technologies. Fluorinated gases like C2H2F4, SF6, CF4, C4F10, ... are used because they allow achieving detector performance needed for data taking in presence of hostile radiation background like the one present at the Large Hadron Collider experiments. However, fluorinated gases are nowadays subject to increasingly stringent regulations that aim to ban their use in the industrial world as soon as new technologies or ecological alternatives are developed. Unfortunately, the application of new ecofriendly gases developed as refrigerant fluid or high voltage insulation medium to particle detectors is not straightforward. To optimize the usage of fluorinated gases and with the idea of preparing the long-term operation of gaseous detectors different strategies have been developed at CERN. These strategies are based on extensive use of gas recirculation systems (both for large detector systems and laboratory applications), the development of gas recuperation plants and the search for new ecofriendly mixtures for existing and future gaseous detectors.