Scintillation Light Data from the ProtoDUNE Dector
Advisor(s)
Dr. Zelimir Djurcic; Argonne National Laboratory
Discipline
Physical Science
Start Date
21-4-2021 10:45 AM
End Date
21-4-2021 11:05 AM
Abstract
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a neutrino experiment where neutrino beams from Fermilab are to be sent to liquid argon particle detectors at Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, approximately 1,300 kilometers away. Before the DUNE detectors could be built, a prototype of a single-phase (SP) time projection chamber (TPC) called ProtoDUNE was built. This is currently the largest liquid argon TPC to have been built, at around 750 tonnes of liquid argon, and began taking data as of October 2018. In this research, we took data from photon detectors of the ProtoDUNE TPC. We analyzed this data using a script written in ROOT/C++ analysis package to search for a correlation between the light waveforms from the argon atoms and the particle that excited the atoms, with the goal to identify particle species. From the currently available data, it can be preliminarily concluded that there is a separation power between the ratio of prompt vs. delayed scintillation light within liquid argon at high energies for beam electrons and cosmic ray muons. In the future, this process should be repeated for more particle species in order to better identify particle species in the DUNE detector and the ProtoDUNE detector, and this research should be combined with existing research efforts to combine the scintillation light information with collected time-projection-chamber charge for more accuracy in event identification.
Scintillation Light Data from the ProtoDUNE Dector
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a neutrino experiment where neutrino beams from Fermilab are to be sent to liquid argon particle detectors at Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, approximately 1,300 kilometers away. Before the DUNE detectors could be built, a prototype of a single-phase (SP) time projection chamber (TPC) called ProtoDUNE was built. This is currently the largest liquid argon TPC to have been built, at around 750 tonnes of liquid argon, and began taking data as of October 2018. In this research, we took data from photon detectors of the ProtoDUNE TPC. We analyzed this data using a script written in ROOT/C++ analysis package to search for a correlation between the light waveforms from the argon atoms and the particle that excited the atoms, with the goal to identify particle species. From the currently available data, it can be preliminarily concluded that there is a separation power between the ratio of prompt vs. delayed scintillation light within liquid argon at high energies for beam electrons and cosmic ray muons. In the future, this process should be repeated for more particle species in order to better identify particle species in the DUNE detector and the ProtoDUNE detector, and this research should be combined with existing research efforts to combine the scintillation light information with collected time-projection-chamber charge for more accuracy in event identification.