Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Determination of Timing Resolution of the SuperBigBite Spectrometer Hadron Calorimeter using Flash Analog to Digital Converters (FADCs)

Student: Victoria White

School: Hofstra University

Mentored By: Alexandre Camsonne

This study centered on enhancing the timing resolution of the Hadron Calorimeter (HCal) at the Thomas Jefferson Lab using Flash Analog-to-Digital Converters (FADCs). Data was refined through strict elastic cuts, determined by experimental geometry and calculations, and the application of a timewalk correction to remove energy dependence on time. Cuts, targeting high-energy events and eliminating background noise, were made on pre-shower energy, invariant proton mass, the track vector position, and the total HCal energy. Differences in the expected and detected x and y positions, as well as the measured nucleon momentum, also guided the cuts. A timewalk correction replaced energy cuts, preserving essential data. This approach improved momentum resolution by constraining elastic kinematics and differentiating between good elastic events and inelastic background. As a result, the baseline intrinsic timing resolution was significantly improved to a best achievable timing resolution of 1.2 ns.