SuperB is a high luminosity e+e- collider experiment that is currently being designed to explore the flavour sector of particle physics. The detector at SuperB will contain a drift chamber, a gas filled device used to measure the momentum and identity of particles produced in the collisions. Particle identification in a drift chamber uses the measured amount of ionization deposited by the particle in the cells of the chamber, which provides a measurement of the particle speed. The ionization loss is traditionally measured by integrating the total charge released by the ionization after a gas amplification avalanche process. Since such a measurement has potentially large uncertainties associated with fluctuations in the gas amplification and other processes, it is possible that measuring the number of primary clusters of ionization caused by the particle could provide an improvement in the measurement of the ionization loss. The results of experiments performed at the University of Victoria and the TRIUMF laboratory M11 test beam using a SuperB drift chamber prototype to test the feasibility of counting clusters are presented here. The ability to separate muons and pions at the momenta explored in the TRIUMF testbeam was similar to the ability to separate pions and kaons at the higher momenta of SuperB. It was found that counting the clusters provides a significant improvement to particle identification when combined with the traditional measurement of the integrated charge. / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/4247 |
| Date | 05 September 2012 |
| Creators | Dejong, Samuel Rudy |
| Contributors | Roney, J. Michael |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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