1,223 research outputs found
A Readout System for the STAR Time Projection Chamber
We describe the readout electronics for the STAR Time Projection Chamber. The
system is made up of 136,608 channels of waveform digitizer, each sampling 512
time samples at 6-12 Mega-samples per second. The noise level is about 1000
electrons, and the dynamic range is 800:1, allowing for good energy loss
() measurement for particles with energy losses up to 40 times minimum
ionizing. The system is functioning well, with more than 99% of the channels
working within specifications.Comment: 22 pages + 8 separate figures; 2 figures are .jpg photos to appear in
Nuclear Instruments and Method
Correcting for Distortions due to Ionization in the STAR TPC
Physics goals of the STAR Experiment at RHIC in recent (and future) years
drive the need to operate the STAR TPC at ever higher luminosities, leading to
increased ionization levels in the TPC gas. The resulting ionic space charge
introduces field distortions in the detector which impact tracking performance.
Further complications arise from ionic charge leakage into the main TPC volume
from the high gain anode region. STAR has implemented corrections for these
distortions based on measures of luminosity, which we present here.
Additionally, we highlight a novel approach to applying the corrections on an
event-by-event basis applicable in conditions of rapidly varying ionization
sources.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, proceedings of the Workshop on Tracking in High
Multiplicity Environments (TIME 05) in Zurich, Switzerland, submitted to
Nucl. Instr. and Meth.
Laser frequency locking by direct measurement of detuning
We present a new method of laser frequency locking in which the feedback
signal is directly proportional to the detuning from an atomic transition, even
at detunings many times the natural linewidth of the transition. Our method is
a form of sub-Doppler polarization spectroscopy, based on measuring two Stokes
parameters ( and ) of light transmitted through a vapor cell. This
extends the linear capture range of the lock loop by up to an order of
magnitude and provides equivalent or improved frequency discrimination as other
commonly used locking techniques.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures Revte
Recommended from our members
Sensor development and readout prototyping for the STAR Pixel detector
The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is designing a new vertex detector. The purpose of this upgrade detector is to provide high resolution pointing to allow for the direct topological reconstruction of heavy flavor decays such as the D{sup 0} by finding vertices displaced from the collision vertex by greater than 60 microns. We are using Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS) as the sensor technology and have a coupled sensor development and readout system plan that leads to a final detector with a <200 {micro}s integration time, 400 M pixels and a coverage of -1 < {eta} < 1. We present our coupled sensor and readout development plan and the status of the prototyping work that has been accomplished
Observation of modified radiative properties of cold atoms in vacuum near a dielectric surface
We have observed a distance-dependent absorption linewidth of cold Rb
atoms close to a dielectric-vacuum interface. This is the first observation of
modified radiative properties in vacuum near a dielectric surface. A cloud of
cold atoms was created using a magneto-optical trap (MOT) and optical molasses
cooling. Evanescent waves (EW) were used to observe the behavior of the atoms
near the surface. We observed an increase of the absorption linewidth with up
to 25% with respect to the free-space value. Approximately half the broadening
can be explained by cavity-quantum electrodynamics (CQED) as an increase of the
natural linewidth and inhomogeneous broadening. The remainder we attribute to
local Stark shifts near the surface. By varying the characteristic EW length we
have observed a distance dependence characteristic for CQED.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, some minor revision
Universal quantum computation and simulation using any entangling Hamiltonian and local unitaries
What interactions are sufficient to simulate arbitrary quantum dynamics in a
composite quantum system? We provide an efficient algorithm to simulate any
desired two-body Hamiltonian evolution using any fixed two-body entangling
n-qubit Hamiltonian and local unitaries. It follows that universal quantum
computation can be performed using any entangling interaction and local unitary
operations.Comment: Added references to NMR refocusing and to earlier work by Leung et al
and Jones and Knil
meson production in = 200 GeV Au+Au and pp collisions at RHIC
We present the results for the measurement of meson production in
= 200 GeV Au+Au and pp collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider (RHIC). Using the event mixing technique, spectra and yields are
obtained from the decay channel for different centrality
bins in Au+Au collisions and in pp collisions. We observe that the spectrum
shape in Au+Au collisions depends weakly on the centrality and the shape of the
spectrum in pp collisions is significantly different from that in Au+Au
collisions. In Au+Au collisions, the extracted yield of meson is flat as
a function of rapidity; The of , extracted from the fit function
to the spectra, shows a different behavior as a function of centrality than
that of , and Comment: Proceedings for the 7th International Conference on Strangeness in
Quark Matte
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