Performance of a modular ton-scale pixel-readout liquid argon time projection chamber

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of a modular, pixel-readout liquid argon TPC prototype, demonstrating its imaging capabilities, signal correlations, and detector stability through analysis of cosmic ray data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel 80k-channel pixelated charge readout and provides comprehensive performance analysis of a modular liquid argon TPC prototype.

Findings

High-quality imaging of cosmic rays achieved

Strong correlation between charge and light signals observed

Detector purity and uniformity confirmed

Abstract

The Module-0 Demonstrator is a single-phase 600 kg liquid argon time projection chamber operated as a prototype for the DUNE liquid argon near detector. Based on the ArgonCube design concept, Module-0 features a novel 80k-channel pixelated charge readout and advanced high-coverage photon detection system. In this paper, we present an analysis of an eight-day data set consisting of 25 million cosmic ray events collected in the spring of 2021. We use this sample to demonstrate the imaging performance of the charge and light readout systems as well as the signal correlations between the two. We also report argon purity and detector uniformity measurements, and provide comparisons to detector simulations.