Ionization Electron Signal Processing in Single Phase LArTPCs I. Algorithm Description and Quantitative Evaluation with MicroBooNE Simulation

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed algorithm for extracting ionization electron signals in single-phase LArTPCs, specifically evaluated using MicroBooNE simulations to improve 3D reconstruction accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a robust charge extraction algorithm for LArTPCs and provides a quantitative evaluation of its performance using detailed simulations.

Findings

Effective recovery of ionization electrons from wire signals

Quantitative agreement between extracted and true charge in simulations

Identification of areas for further improvement

Abstract

We describe the concept and procedure of drifted-charge extraction developed in the MicroBooNE experiment, a single-phase liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC). This technique converts the raw digitized TPC waveform to the number of ionization electrons passing through a wire plane at a given time. A robust recovery of the number of ionization electrons from both induction and collection anode wire planes will augment the 3D reconstruction, and is particularly important for tomographic reconstruction algorithms. A number of building blocks of the overall procedure are described. The performance of the signal processing is quantitatively evaluated by comparing extracted charge with the true charge through a detailed TPC detector simulation taking into account position-dependent induced current inside a single wire region and across multiple wires. Some areas for further improvement of the performance of the charge extraction procedure are also discussed.