Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Timing Calibration of SuperBigBite Hadron Calorimeter in Hall A

Student: Isaac Smythe

School: East Tennessee State University

Mentored By: Alexandre Camsonne

At Jefferson Lab, the focus is to better understand the nature of particles. This experiment, it is the momentum of the particle and how they react to magnetic fields that is being studied, and this project is focused on correcting the time of flight of the nucleons. To start, the electron beam hits a liquid deuterium target, and the electrons and nucleons fly to separate detectors. The nucleons go through a magnetic field before hitting the detector, which bends the path of the protons. This and scattering effects create inconsistent time of flight measurements, which leads to inaccurate momentum. To correct this, histograms of the time of flight are created for each channel with the histogram mean being the time of flight correction for that channel.

[Watch the presentation on YouTube]