History

PAVICOM has been originally oriented to the processing of nuclear photoemulsions exposed to the lead nucleos beam of the energy 158A GeV at the accelerator SPS/CERN within the framework of experiment EMU-15. The main goal of this experiment was search for evedences of possible formation of the sub-hadronic states of the nuclear matter at sufficiently high temperatures and densities which could manifest themselves by some non-trivial many-particle correlations in the secondary particles distributions. Before long, it has been understood, however, that applicability range of the setup could be much wider: its universality and high-speed action as well as unceasing software updating made it possible to adjust it for the needs of some other investigations made in our institute and outside. It is worthy mentioning that the PAVICOM group contributions never reduced to offering an opportunity of using the setup facilities: the conventional working regime of the units was, at least, adapted properly as well as the methodical peculiarities of measurements.

Being used as a track detector, nuclear emulsion is undoubtfully privileged to provide very high spatial resolution - it enables to resolve the particles whose scattering angles differ by about 10-3 radian only - and this resolution remains unchanged over a wide pseudorapidity interval. This is why the nuclear emulsions remain for a long time to be in use as a measurement tool in the nuclear and high-energy physics.

At the same time, some obvious drawbacks of nuclear emulsions is also well known. The most unpleasant of them is the extremaly tedious processing of primary experimental information, if a hand or even semi-automatic method of treatment is exploited.

Moreover, it is very difficult, under such way of doing, to check the completed measurement, if some mistakes occur (such as particle track missing by microscopist and so on).

Owing to adoption of completely automatized measurement setups during the recent years, the time of tracker detecrtor data processing was about 1000 times shortened as compared to that taken by semi-automatic technique. This makes accessible to handle some large collections of the experimental data as well as to improve the statistical confidence level.

For the first time, the automats of such a tipe were put into operation in Japan in the middle of 90th. Currently, about 20 of them are operiting all over the world, 7 of them being mounted in Europe. PAVICOM is the only facility of this world standard in Russia.