Systematic Comparison of the MINOS Near and Far Detector Readout Systems
- Univ. of Oxford (United Kingdom). Queen's College
The MINOS experiment is a neutrino oscillation baseline experiment intending to use high resolution L/E neutrinos to measure the atmospheric neutrino oscillations parameters to unprecedented precision. Two detectors have been built to realize the measurements, a Near detector, located about 1km downstream from the beam target at the Fermi Laboratory, and a Far detector, located at 736km, at the Soudan Laboratory. The technique relies on the Near detector to measure the un-oscillated neutrino spectrum, while the Far detector measures the neutrino spectrum once oscillated. The comparison between the two measurements is expected to allow MINOS to measure Δm2 beyond 10% precision level. The Near and Far detectors have been built similarly to minimize possible systematic effects. Both detectors have been endowed with different readout systems, as the beam event rates are very different. The MINOS calibration detector (CalDet), installed at CERN, was instrumented with both readout systems such that they can simultaneously measure and characterize the energy deposition (response and event topology) of incident known particle from test-beams. This thesis presents the investigations to quantify the impact of the performance of both readout systems on the MINOS results using the measurements obtained with CalDet. The relative comparison of the responses of both readout systems have been measured to be consistent with being identical within a systematic uncertainty of 0.6%. The event topologies have been found to be negligibly affected. In addition, the performance of the detector simulations have been thoroughly investigated and validated to be in agreement with data within similar level of uncertainties.
- Research Organization:
- Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-76CH03000
- OSTI ID:
- 875529
- Report Number(s):
- FERMILAB-THESIS-2005-50; TRN: US0604994
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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