This is a big part of why the LHC experiment is so expensive. Turns out that equipment that exists to create high energy collisions (and as a product a lot of spicy radiation) goes brittle or the sensors go dark pretty quickly and need to be replaced a lot. I did sim work on a replacement detector setup for the experiment back in undergrad and the lions share of my simulations were showing how the crystals would perform at various levels of degradation
The wiki on radiation embrittlement is pretty good reading for any mechanical engineers out there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_embrittlement
This is a big part of why the LHC experiment is so expensive. Turns out that equipment that exists to create high energy collisions (and as a product a lot of spicy radiation) goes brittle or the sensors go dark pretty quickly and need to be replaced a lot. I did sim work on a replacement detector setup for the experiment back in undergrad and the lions share of my simulations were showing how the crystals would perform at various levels of degradation