Bremsstrahlung radiation in the deuteron - proton collision

TL;DR

This paper reports the first observation of Bremsstrahlung radiation in the deuteron-proton collision at COSY, using the COSY-11 detector to identify gamma signals and analyze nucleon-nucleon interactions.

Contribution

It presents the first detection of gamma radiation from the dp --> dpgamma reaction at COSY, with detailed calibration and timing analysis of the neutral particle detector.

Findings

First observation of gamma signals in dp --> dpgamma at COSY

Calibration methods improved timing resolution of the detector

Accurate neutron momentum determination enabled precise event reconstruction

Abstract

Despite the fact that Bremsstrahlung radiation has been observed many years ago, it is still the subject of interest of many theoretical and experimental groups. Due to the high sensitivity of the NN --> NNgamma reaction to the nucleon-nucleon potential, Bremsstrahlung radiation is used as a tool to investigate details of the nucleon-nucleon interaction. Such investigations can be performed at the cooler synchrotron COSY in the Research Centre Juelich, by dint of the COSY-11 detection system. For the first time at the COSY--11 experiment signals from gamma - quanta were observed in the time-of-flight distribution of neutral particles measured with the neutral particle detector. In this thesis the results of the identification of Bremsstrahlung radiation emitted via the dp --> dpgamma reaction in data taken with a proton target and a deuteron beam are presented and discussed. The time resolution of the neutral particle detector and its timing calibration are crucial for the identification of the dp --> dpgamma reaction. Therefore, methods of determining the relative timing between individual modules - constituting the neutron detector - and of the general time offset with respect to the other detector components are described. Furthermore the accuracy of the momentum determination of the registered neutron which defines the precision of the event reconstruction was extracted from the data.