[Seminars] HEP Seminar - Today!

[Holly Hernandez]

HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS SEMINAR TODAY

Monday January 25, 2016
ERC 401
4:15pm

Speaker: Eric Oberla (UChicago)

Title: Developing a water Cherenkov optical time-projection chamber

Abstract: The LAPPD collaboration was formed to develop large-area photodetectors based on micro-channel plates (MCP) for precise time-of-flight measurements in large-scale detectors for high-energy physics. As part of this project, we have designed readout electronics for these 400 cm^2 photodetectors using a custom front-end 10 gigasample-per-second waveform-digitizing integrated circuit. The prospect of large-area, scalable, and high-granularity photodetectors opens the possibility of building a water-based `optical time-projection chamber' (OTPC), in which high-energy charged- particle tracks are reconstructed by measuring the relative times and positions of the `drifted' Cherenkov photons.

A first experimental test the OTPC concept was performed at the Fermilab Test-Beam Facility using a 40 kg cylindrical water volume, which was instrumented with an array of small, commercial MCP- PMTs in combination with optical mirrors. The initial test-beam run examined the detector response to multi-GeV muons. By measuring the time-of-arrival and the position of these photons at the surface of the detector to better than 100 ps and a few mm, we measure a 3D spatial resolution of 15 mm on the particle track. The application of this technique to larger-scale water-based neutrino detectors will be discussed.
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