Capital Equipment for Laboratory Infrastructure

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This application for Capital Equipment follows the Consolidated Grant application by the Edinburgh Particle Physics Research Group, ST/K001302/1. Here we request funding for items that will enhace our capabilities to contribute to the R&D development of front-end modules for silicon pixel detectors, and that will enable development of single photon counting devices for use in direct dark matter searches. Edinburgh carries an important role in the development of the ATLAS upgrade, as described in the ATLAS upgrade bid, ST/L001179/1. The group contributes to the design and R&D of the front-end modules of the prototype forward pixel detector and will take part in the module production and loading using the expertise built up during the R&D phase. The group recently has invested significantly in state-of-the-art laboratory infrastructure and established an Advanced Detector Development Centre (ADDC) to facilitate this contribution, but we had to descope some essential components due to limitations of funds. The funds requested here will suffice to close these gaps and enable the group to contribute to the development of the ATLAS upgrade as pledged.Our dark matter research contributes strongly to much of the UK programme, including LUX, LZ and DRIFT, with particular expertise and responsibility for developing and assuring ultra-low background operation. At present our development of new instrumentation and techniques is hindered by a lack of of local access to suitable data acquisition apparatus - this request provides a low-cost solution, enabling significantly more sophisticated studies to be performed here in Edinburgh, avoiding the need to travel to suitably equipped laboratories.