2016 CAP Congress / Congrès de l'ACP 2016

Pulse Finding and Single Photon Counting for the DEAP-3600 Experiment

15 Jun 2016, 13:15

15m

Colonel By D103 (University of Ottawa)

Oral (Student, In Competition) / Orale (Étudiant(e), inscrit à la compétition) Particle Physics / Physique des particules (PPD) W2-8 Cosmic Frontier: Dark Matter IV (PPD) / Frontière cosmique: matière sombre IV (PPD)

Speaker

Thomas McElroy (University of Alberta)

Description

DEAP-3600, comprised of a 1 tonne fiducial mass of ultra-pure liquid argon, is designed to achieve world-leading sensitivity for spin-independent dark matter interactions. DEAP-3600 uses an array of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) to measure the time distribution of scintillation light arising from the de-excitation of argon dimers. This measurement allows background events from Ar-39 decays to be rejected at a high level using pulse shape discrimination. The performance of this analysis relies critically on DEAP’s ability to identify pulses in the PMT waveforms and accurately assess the number of photo-electrons contributing to each pulse. This talk will present an algorithm developed for finding pulses and identifying the number of photo-electrons, as well as removing pulses from unwanted PMT artifacts. A method for quickly identifying single-photoelectron-like pulses and its use to provide a high level of data compression will also be discussed.

Presentation materials

Thomas_McElroy_CAP2016.pdf