Calibration of the charge and energy response of the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber using muons and protons

MicroBooNE Collaboration and Blake, A. and Devitt, D. and Lister, A. and Nowak, J. (2020) Calibration of the charge and energy response of the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber using muons and protons. Journal of Instrumentation, 15. ISSN 1748-0221

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Abstract

We describe a method used to calibrate the position- and time-dependent response of the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber anode wires to ionization particle energy loss. The method makes use of crossing cosmic-ray muons to partially correct anode wire signals for multiple effects as a function of time and position, including misconfigured or cross-connected TPC wires, space charge effects, electron attenuation, diffusion, and recombination. The overall energy scale is then determined using fully-contained beam-induced muons originating and stopping in the active region of the detector. Using this method, we obtain an absolute energy scale uncertainty of 3\% in data. We use stopping protons to further refine the relation between the measured charge and the energy loss for highly-ionizing particles. This data-driven detector calibration improves both the measurement of total deposited energy and particle identification based on energy loss per unit length as a function of residual range.