Equalizing Photoelectron Response Across Scintillators Employing Wavelength Shifting Fibers

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/bn999731t

Abstract

The PHENIX project (Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment) is a relativistic heavy ion physics collaboration and detector which investigates the quark-gluon plasma. Essential to this project is a hadronic calorimeter which makes use of scintillator plates to measure incident particle energies. The subject of this thesis and the research it describes is in equalizing the response from detection events across a scintillation panel using silicon photomultipliers for use in an upgrade to the PHENIX hadronic calorimeter. This research includes a many step hardware and software process from data collection to data analysis, and is both a hardware and software methods project. During this process, several methods for categorizing and quantifying characteristic behavior of scintillator panels which rely upon optical fibers to communicate with silicon photomultipliers have been explored. These methods will be detailed in the thesis which follows. The essential theory supporting each step in the experiment will be explained as well as the findings of the experiment. As such, this research is also results oriented. Over the project, we have succeeded in modeling the photoelectron count across test scintillator panels and have observed consistency in this behavior.

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