A high quality beam of linearly polarized photons of several GeV will become available with the coherent bremsstrahlung technique at JLab. We have developed a polarimeter which requires about two meters of the beam line, has an analyzing power of 20% and an efficiency of 0.02%. The layout and first results of a polarimeter test on the laser back-scattering photon beam at SPring-8/LEPS are presented.
We report on the design and construction of a high-energy photon polarimeter for measuring the degree of polarization of a linearly-polarized photon beam. The photon polarimeter uses the process of pair production on an atomic electron (triplet production). The azimuthal distribution of scattered atomic electrons following triplet production yields information regarding the degree of linear polarization of the incident photon beam. The polarimeter, operated in conjunction with a pair spectrometer, uses a silicon strip detector to measure the recoil electron distribution resulting from triplet photoproduction in a beryllium target foil. The analyzing power $Sigma_A$ for the device using a 75 $rm{mu m}$ beryllium converter foil is about 0.2, with a relative systematic uncertainty in $Sigma_A$ of 1.5%.
A portable NMR polarimeter system has been developed to measure the polarization of a polarized Hydrogen-Deuteride (HD) target for hadron photoproduction experiments at SPring-8. The polarized HD target is produced at the Research Center for Nuclear Physics (RCNP), Osaka university and is transported to SPring-8. The HD polarization should be monitored at both places. We have constructed the portable NMR polarimeter system by replacing the devices in the conventional system with the software system with PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (PXI). The weight of the NMR system is downsized from 80 kg to 7 kg, and the cost is reduced to 25%. We check the performance of the portable NMR polarimeter system. The signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio of the NMR signal for the portable system is about 50% of that for the conventional NMR system. This performance of the portable NMR system is proved to be compatible with the conventional NMR system for the polarization measurement.
An imaging calorimeter has been designed and is being built for the PAMELA satellite-borne experiment. The physics goals of the experiment are the measurement of the flux of antiprotons, positrons and light isotopes in the cosmic radiation. The calorimeter is designed to perform a precise measurement of the total energy deposited, to reconstruct the spatial development of the showers (both in the longitudinal and in the transverse directions), and to measure the energy distribution along the shower itself. From this information, the calorimeter will identify antiprotons from a electron background and positrons in a background of protons with an efficiency of about 95% and a rejection power better than 10^-4. Furthermore, a self-trigger system has been implemented with the calorimeter that will be employed to measure high-energy (from about 300 GeV to more than 1 TeV) electrons. The instrument is composed of 22 layers of tungsten, each sandwiched between two views of silicon strip detectors (X and Y). The signals are read out by a custom VLSI front-end chip, the CR1.4P, specifically designed for the PAMELA calorimeter, with a dynamic range of 7.14 pC or 1400 mip (minimum ionizing particle). We report on the simulated performance and prototype design.
A Fabry-Perot cavity polarimeter, installed in 2003 at HERA for the second phase of its operation, is described. The cavity polarimeter was designed to measure the longitudinal polarisation of the HERA electron beam with high precision for each electron bunch spaced with a time interval of 96ns. Within the cavity the laser intensity was routinely enhanced up to a few kW from its original value of 0.7W in a stable and controllable way. By interacting such a high intensity laser beam with the HERA electron beam it is possible to measure its polarisation with a relative statistical precision of 2% per bunch per minute. Detailed systematic studies have also been performed resulting in a systematic uncertainty of 1%.
The proposed ICAL detector at INO is a large sized underground magnetized iron detector. ICAL is designed to reconstruct muon momentum using magnetic spectrometers. Energy measurement using magnets fail for muons in TeV range, since the angular deflection of the muon in the magnetic field is negligible and the muon tracks become nearly straight. A new technique for measuring the energy of muons in the TeV range is used by the CCFR neutrino detector, known as the Pair-Meter technique. This technique estimates muon energy from measurements of the energy deposited by the muon in many layers of an iron-calorimeter through e$^+$ and e$^-$ pair production. In this work we have performed Geant4 based preliminary analysis for iron plates and have demonstrated the observational feasibility of very high energy muons (1TeV-1000TeV) in a large mass underground detector operating as a pair-meter. This wide range of energy spectrum will be helpful for studying the cosmic rays in the Knee region and an understanding of the atmospheric neutrino flux for the present and future ultra high-energy atmospheric neutrino experiments.