The use of nuclear emulsions in very large physics experiments is now possible thanks to the recent improvements in the industrial production of emulsions and to the development of fast automated ...microscopes. In this paper the hardware performances of the
European Scanning System (ESS) are described. The ESS is a very fast automatic system developed for the mass scanning of the emulsions of the OPERA experiment, which requires microscopes with scanning speeds of
∼
20
cm
2
/
h
in an emulsion volume of
44
μ
m
thickness.
The technique of nuclear emulsions for high-energy physics experiments is being revived, thanks to the remarkable progress in measurement automation achieved in the past years. The present paper ...describes the features and performances of the
European Scanning System, a last-generation automatic microscope working at a scanning speed of
20
cm
2
/
h
. The system has been developed in the framework of the OPERA experiment, designed to unambigously detect
ν
μ
→
ν
τ
oscillations in nuclear emulsions.
The Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LAr TPC) technique is a promising technology for future neutrino detectors. At LHEP of the University of Bern (Switzerland), an R&D program towards large ...detectors are on-going. The main goal is to show the feasibility of long drift paths over many meters. Therefore, a liquid Argon TPC with 5 m of drift distance was constructed. Many other aspects of the liquid Argon TPC technology are also investigated, such as a new device to generate high voltage in liquid Argon (Greinacher circuit), a recirculation filtering system and the multi-photon ionization of liquid Argon with a UV laser. Two detectors are built: a medium size prototype for specific detector technology studies, and ARGONTUBE, a 5 m long device.
OPERA is a massive lead/emulsion target for a long-baseline neutrino oscillation search. More than 90% of the useful experimental data in OPERA will be produced by the scanning of emulsion plates ...with the automatic microscopes. The main goal of the data processing in OPERA will be the search, analysis and identification of primary and secondary vertices produced by neutrino in lead-emulsion target.
The volume of middle- and high-level data to be analysed and stored is expected to be of the order of several Gb per event. The storage, calibration, reconstruction, analysis and visualization of this data is the task of FEDRA system written in
C
++
and based on ROOT framework. The system is now actively used for processing of test beams and simulation data. Several interesting algorithmic solutions permits us to make effective code for fast pattern recognition in heavy signal/noise conditions. The system consists of the storage part, intercalibration and segments linking part, track finding and fitting, vertex finding and fitting and kinematical analysis parts. Kalman Filtering technique is used for tracks & vertex fitting. ROOT-based event display is used for interactive analysis of the special events.
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