Tagged Neutron, Anti-neutron and K-Long beams in an Upgraded MIPP Spectrometer

TL;DR

The upgraded MIPP spectrometer will produce high-rate tagged neutron, anti-neutron, and K-long beams, enabling detailed calorimeter response studies for neutral particles with high precision.

Contribution

This paper demonstrates the capability of the upgraded MIPP spectrometer to generate high-rate tagged neutral particle beams for advanced detector calibration and response analysis.

Findings

Achieved a data acquisition rate of 3000 events/sec after upgrades

Produced tagged neutron, anti-neutron, and K-long beams with known energies

Estimated tens of thousands of tagged particles per day

Abstract

The MIPP experiment operating with an upgraded data acquisition system will be capable of acquiring data at the rate of 3000 events per second. Currently we are limited to a rate of 30 Hz due to the bottlenecks in the data acquisition electronics of the Time Projection Chamber (TPC). With the speeded up DAQ, MIPP will be capable of acquiring data at the rate of $\approx$5 million events per day. This assumes a conservative beam duty cycle of 4~sec spill every 2 minutes with a 42% downtime for main injector beam manipulations for the $\bar{p}$ source. We show that such a setup is capable of producing tagged neutron, anti-neutron and $K^0_L$ beams that are produced in the MIPP cryogenic hydrogen target using proton, anti-proton and $K^{\pm}$ beams. These tagged beams can be used to study calorimeter responses for use in studies involving the Particle Flow Algorithm (PFA). The energy of these tagged beams will be known to better than 2% on a particle by particle level by means of constrained fitting. We expect a tagged beam rate in the tens of thousands a day. The MIPP spectrometer thus offers a unique opportunity to study the response of calorimeters to neutral particles.