Undergraduate Honors Thesis

 

Zero Suppression in sPHENIX Calorimeters Public Deposited

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https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/wh246t17v
Abstract
  • The sPHENIX (super Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment) detector at RHIC (the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) is an upgrade to the existing PHENIX detector, and is scheduled to begin taking data in 2023. sPHENIX will probe the properties of the quark gluon plasma (QGP), a state of asymptotically free quarks and gluons, created in heavy ion collisions and hypothesized to exist for a short time in the early universe. Since this state of matter only lasts approximately 10-23s, the primary insight into properties of the QGP comes from measuring the collimated sprays of particles produced from hard interactions as well as the distribution of particles produced when asymptotically free quarks and gluons generate new quark anti-quark pairs and combine into hadrons (hadronization). The detector depends on a system of calorimeters consisting of three distinct layers: an electromagnetic calorimeter and two hadronic calorimeters (inner and outer). Each calorimeter contains individual sensors (towers) with varying numbers between the different calorimeters. The calorimeters will feed their data into custom electronics packages, Data Collection Module II's (DCM II). The DCM II's are capable of handling the full output from the hadronic calorimeters. However, due to the spatial segmentation of the electromagnetic calorimeter and the bandwidth limitations of the DCM II, it is impossible to retain full information from all towers. Consequently, it is necessary to suppress the output from low energy towers in the electromagnetic calorimeter. Completely eliminating data from these towers will, however, introduce a bias and adversely affect the clustering algorithms used to measure the particles from the QGP. In the following analysis, I assess the feasibility of retaining data from all towers while dynamically reducing the information size for low energy towers. Results of simulations of Au-Au collisions show that this scheme reduces data rates to a level manageable by the DCM II's.

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  • 2021-03-31
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  • 2021-04-11
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