No Arabic abstract
Micro-Pattern Gaseous Detectors (MPGDs) such as Micromegas or GEM are used in particle physics experiments for their capabilities in particle tracking at high rates. Their excellent position resolutions are well known but their energy characteristics have been less studied. The energy resolution is mainly affected by the ionisation processes and detector gain fluctuations. This paper presents a method to separetely measure those two contributions to the energy resolution of a Micromegas detector. The method relies on the injection of a controlled number of electrons. The Micromegas has a 1.6-mm drift zone and a 160-$mu$m amplification gap. It is operated in Ne 95%-iC$mathrm{_4}$H$mathrm{_{10}}$ 5% at atmospheric pressure. The electrons are generated by non-linear photoelectric emission issued from the photons of a pulsed 337-nm wavelength laser coupled to a focusing system. The single electron response has been measured at different gains (3.7 10$mathrm{^4}$, 5.0 10$mathrm{^4}$ and 7.0 10$mathrm{^4}$) and is fitted with a good agreement by a Polya distribution. From those fits, a relative gain variance of 0.31$pm$0.02 is deduced. The setup has also been characterised at several voltages by fitting the energy resolution measured as a function of the number of primary electrons, ranging from 5 up to 210. A maximum value of the Fano factor (0.37) has been estimated for a 5.9 keV X-rays interacting in the Ne 95%-iC$mathrm{_4}$H$mathrm{_{10}}$ 5% gas mixture.
The latest Micromesh Gas Amplification Structures (Micromegas) are achieving outstanding energy resolution for low energy photons, with values as low as 11% FWHM for the 5.9 keV line of $^{55}$Fe in argon/isobutane mixtures at atmospheric pressure. At higher energies (MeV scale), these measurements are more complicated due to the difficulty in confining the events in the chamber, although there is no fundamental reason why resolutions of 1% FWHM or below could not be reached. There is much motivation to demonstrate experimentally this fact in Xe mixtures due to the possible application of Micromegas readouts to the Double Beta Decay search of $^{136}$Xe, or in other experiments needing calorimetry and topology in the same detector. In this paper, we report on systematic measurements of energy resolution with state-of-the-art Micromegas using a 5.5 MeV alpha source in high pressure Ar/isobutane mixtures. Values as low as 1.8% FWHM have been obtained, with possible evidence that better resolutions are achievable. Similar measurements in Xe, of which a preliminary result is also shown here, are under progress.
Cosmic ray muon has strong penetrating power and no ionizing radiation hazards, which make cosmic ray muon an ideal probe to detect the special nuclear materials (SNM). However, the existing muon tomography experiments have the disadvantages of long imaging time and poor imaging accuracy, due to the low event rate of muons and small interaction cross section between muons and material nucleus. To optimize the imaging quality and imaging time, high spatial resolution muon tomography facility should be investigated more deeply. Micromegas with its high spatial resolution and large detection area is one of the suitable detectors for the muon tomography facility. In this paper, a high spatial muon tomography prototype was presented. The Micromegas detector was based on thermal bonding technique, which was easy to manufacture and can achieve good performance. A novel multiplexing method base on position encoding was introduced in this research to reduce the channels in an order of magnitude. Then, this paper carried out the research of a general and scalable muon imaging readout system, which employed a discrete architecture of front-end and back-end electronics and can be adapted to different scales of muon tomography experiments. Finally, a tomography prototype system was designed and implemented, including eight Micromegas detectors, four front-end electronics cards and a data acquisition board. Test results showed that this prototype can image objects with 2cm size and distinguish different materials.
Determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy using a reactor neutrino experiment at $sim$60 km is analyzed. Such a measurement is challenging due to the finite detector resolution, the absolute energy scale calibration, as well as the degeneracies caused by current experimental uncertainty of $|Delta m^2_{32}|$. The standard $chi^2$ method is compared with a proposed Fourier transformation method. In addition, we show that for such a measurement to succeed, one must understand the non-linearity of the detector energy scale at the level of a few tenths of percent.
In a neutrinoless double-beta decay ($0 ubetabeta$) experiment, energy resolution is important to distinguish between $0 ubetabeta$ and background events. CAlcium fluoride for studies of Neutrino and Dark matters by Low Energy Spectrometer (CANDLES) discerns the $0 ubetabeta$ of $^{48}$Ca using a CaF$_2$ scintillator as the detector and source. Photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) collect scintillation photons. At the Q-value of $^{48}$Ca, the current energy resolution (2.6%) exceeds the ideal statistical fluctuation of the number of photoelectrons (1.6%). Because of CaF$_2$s long decay constant of 1000 ns, a signal integration within 4000 ns is used to calculate the energy. The baseline fluctuation ($sigma_{baseline}$) is accumulated in the signal integration, thus degrading the energy resolution. This paper studies $sigma_{baseline}$ in the CANDLES detector, which severely degrades the resolution by 1% at the Q-value of $^{48}$Ca. To avoid $sigma_{rm baseline}$, photon counting can be used to obtain the number of photoelectrons in each PMT; however, a significant photoelectron signal overlapping probability in each PMT causes missing photoelectrons in counting and reduces the energy resolution. Partial photon counting reduces $sigma_{baseline}$ and minimizes photoelectron loss. We obtain improved energy resolutions of 4.5-4.0% at 1460.8 keV ($gamma$-ray of $^{40}$K), and 3.3-2.9% at 2614.5 keV ($gamma$-ray of $^{208}$Tl). The energy resolution at the Q-value is estimated to be improved from 2.6% to 2.2%, and the detector sensitivity for the $0 ubetabeta$ half-life of $^{48}$Ca can be improved by 1.09 times.
The aim of the MIMAC project is to detect non-baryonic Dark Matter with a directional TPC. The recent Micromegas efforts towards building a large size detector will be described, in particular the characterization measurements of a prototype detector of 10 $times$ 10 cm$^2$ with a 2 dimensional readout plane. Track reconstruction with alpha particles will be shown.