The book on Particle Detectors was originally published in German (‘Teilchendetektoren’) with the Bibliographisches Institut Mannheim in 1993. In 1996, it was translated and substantially updated by one of us (Claus Grupen) and published with Cambridge University Press. Since then many new detectors and substantial improvements of existing detectors have surfaced. In particular, the new proton collider under construction at CERN (the Large Hadron Collider LHC), the planning for new detectors at a future electron–positron linear collider, and experiments in astroparticle physics research require a further sophistication of existing and construction of novel particle detectors. With an ever increasing pace of development, the properties of modern detectors allow for high-precision measurements in fields like timing, spatial resolution, energy and momentum resolution, and particle identification.

Already in the past, electron–positron storage rings, like LEP at CERN, have studied electroweak physics and quantum chromodynamics at energies around the electroweak scale (≈ 100 GeV). The measurement of lifetimes in the region of picoseconds required high spatial resolutions on the order of a few microns. The Large Hadron Collider and the Tevatron at Fermilab will hopefully be able to solve the long-standing question of the generation of masses by finding evidence for particles in the Higgs sector.