Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Noise Correlation Study for the Hall B Silicon Vertex Tracker

Student: Ethan W. Cline

School: University of New Hampshire

Mentored By: Amrit Yegneswaran

Hall B is building a Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) for the 12 GeV upgrade of the accelerator. The SVT will track charged particles generated by the interaction of the electron beam with the target. The aim of the project was to determine whether there is a correlation between the noise readings of any two channels of a given SVT module and to characterize the correlation. For the test, a single channel was chosen to be the control channel and signals were injected in adjacent channels. If the control channel reported a signal that significantly deviated from its baseline, then by definition there is correlation. A small correlation was found on the control channel, when four adjacent channels on either side of the selected channel were injected with a 300 mV signal. This voltage level will not be produced on the module by charged particles generated during experiments in Hall B.