PMT Gain Calibration In MicroBooNE

UNSPECIFIED (2019) PMT Gain Calibration In MicroBooNE. Other. UNSPECIFIED.

Abstract

Liquid argon (LAr) is an ideal scintillating detector medium: it is very bright, releasing O(10, 000) photons per MeV of deposited energy, and is also transparent to its own scintillation. Light data in liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) experiments in general and MicroBooNE in particular has many important uses. In MicroBooNE, light collected over all photosensors is used as a first and second level trigger. At the data acquisition stage ∼ 5PE is required for triggering. An additional software trigger of ≈ 20PE helps reject a large portion of cosmic ray background in events with no neutrino interaction occurring during the beam spill. Scintillation can also be used for the determination of absolute drift coordinate of non-beam related events. Additionally, matching reconstructed light to reconstructed TPC charge is a powerful tool for cosmic ray rejection. Finally due to the specific properties of LAr scintillation, light information can be used for particle identification. For many of these tasks good modeling of the light response of the detector is crucial. Applying data-driven corrections to optical detector data and simulation (prediction) allows to obtain a well calibrated energy scale from the PMTs. This reduces discrepancies between data and simulation, and calibrates out non-uniformities of data over the full data taking period. Thus it is expected to factor in improving systematic uncertainties on MicroBooNE’s flagship analyses - the low energy excess (LEE) (see e.g. [2]) search and LAr-ν cross-section measurements.