A cylindrical GEM tracker is under construction in order to replace and improve the inner tracking system of the BESIII experiment. Tests with planar chamber prototypes were carried out on the H4 ...beam line of SPS (CERN) with muons of 150 GeV/c momentum, to evaluate the efficiency and resolution under different working conditions. The obtained efficiency was in the 96 - 98% range. Two complementary algorithms for the position determination were developed: the charge centroid and the micro-TPC methods. With the former, resolutions <100 micron and <200 micron were achieved without and with magnetic field, respectively. The micro-TPC improved these results. By the end of 2016, the first cylindrical prototype was tested on the same beam line. It showed optimal stability under different settings. The comparison of its performance with respect to the planar chambers is ongoing. Here, the results of the planar prototype tests will be addressed.
Performance of triple GEM prototypes has been evaluated by means of a muon beam at the H4 line of the SPS test area at CERN. The data from two planar prototypes have been reconstructed and analyzed ...offline with two clusterization methods: the enter of gravity of the charge distribution and the micro Time Projection Chamber (\muTPC). Concerning the spatial resolution, the charge centroid cluster reconstruction performs extremely well with no magnetic field: the resolution is well below 100 \mum . Increasing the magnetic field intensity, the resolution degrades almost linearly as effect of the Lorentz force that displaces, broadens and asymmetrizes the electron avalanche. Tuning the electric fields of the GEM prototype we could achieve the unprecedented spatial resolution of 190 \mum at 1 Tesla. In order to boost the spatial resolution with strong magnetic field and inclined tracks a \muTPC cluster reconstruction has been investigated. Such a readout mode exploits the good time resolution of the GEM detector and electronics to reconstruct the trajectory of the particle inside the conversion gap. Beside the improvement of the spatial resolution, information on the track angle can be also extracted. The new clustering algorithm has been tested with diagonal tracks with no magnetic field showing a resolution between 100 um and 150 um for the incident angle ranging from 10{\deg} to 45{\deg} . Studies show similar performance with 1 Tesla magnetic field. This is the first use of a \muTPC readout with a triple GEM detector in magnetic field. This study has shown that a combined readout is capable to guarantee stable performance over a broad spectrum of particle momenta and incident angles, up to a 1 Tesla magnetic field.
Phys. Rev. D 95, 034038 (2017) The $J/\psi$ meson has negative $G$-parity so that, in the limit of isospin
conservation, its decay into $\pi^+\pi^-$ should be purely electromagnetic.
However, the ...measured branching fraction $\mathcal{B}(J/\psi\to\pi^+\pi^-)$
exceeds by more than 3.9 standard deviations the expectation computed according
to BaBar data on the $e^+e^-\to\pi^+\pi^-$ cross section. The possibility that
the two-gluon plus one-photon decay mechanism is not suppressed by $G$-parity
conservation is discussed, even by considering other multi-pion decay channels.
As also obtained by phenomenological computation, such a decay mechanism could
be responsible for the observed discrepancy. Finally, we notice that the BESIII
experiment, having the potential to perform an accurate measurement of the
$e^+e^-\to\pi^+\pi^-$ cross section in the 3 GeV energy region, can definitely
prove or disprove this strong $G$-parity-violating mechanism by confirming or
confuting the BaBar data.
A cylindrical GEM detector is under development, to serve as an upgraded inner tracker at the BESIII spectrometer. It will consist of three layers of cylindrically-shaped triple GEMs surrounding the ...interaction point. The experiment is taking data at the e+e- collider BEPCII in Beijing (China) and the GEM tracker will be installed in 2018. Tests on the performances of triple GEMs in strong magnetic field have been run by means of the muon beam available in the H4 line of SPS (CERN) with both planar chambers and the first cylindrical prototype. Efficiencies and resolutions have been evaluated using different gains, gas mixtures, with and without magnetic field. The obtained efficiency is 97-98% on single coordinate view, in many operational arrangements. The spatial resolution for planar GEMs has been evaluated with two different algorithms for the position determination: the charge centroid and the micro time projection chamber (mu-TPC) methods. The two modes are complementary and are able to cope with the asymmetry of the electron avalanche when running in magnetic field, and with non-orthogonal incident tracks. With the charge centroid, a resolution lower than 100 micron has been reached without magnetic field and lower than 200 micron with a magnetic field up to 1 T. The mu-TPC mode showed to be able to improve those results. In the first beam test with the cylindrical prototype, the detector had a very good stability under different voltage configurations and particle intensities. The resolution evaluation is in progress.
For the upgrade of the inner tracker of the BESIII spectrometer, planned for 2018, a lightweight tracker based on an innovative Cylindrical Gas Electron Multiplier (CGEM) detector is now under ...development. The analogue readout of the CGEM enables the use of a charge centroid algorithm to improve the spatial resolution to better than 130 um while loosening the pitch strip to 650 um, which allows to reduce the total number of channels to about 10 000. The channels are readout by 160 dedicated integrated 64-channel front-end ASICs, providing a time and charge measurement and featuring a fully-digital output. The energy measurement is extracted either from the time-over-threshold (ToT) or the 10-bit digitisation of the peak amplitude of the signal. The time of the event is generated by quad-buffered low-power TDCs, allowing for rates in excess of 60 kHz per channel. The TDCs are based on analogue interpolation techniques and produce a time stamp (or two, if working in ToT mode) of the event with a time resolution better than 50 ps. The front-end noise, based on a CSA and CR-RC2 shapers, dominate the channel intrinsic time jitter, which is less than 5 ns r.m.s.. The time information of the hit can be used to reconstruct the track path, operating the detector as a small TPC and hence improving the position resolution when the distribution of the cloud, due to large incident angle or magnetic field, is very broad. Event data is collected by an off-detector motherboard, where each GEM-ROC readout card handles 4 ASIC carrier PCBs (512 channels). Configuration upload and data readout between the off-detector electronics and the VME-based data collector cards are managed by bi-directional fibre optical links.
The PANDA experiment will be built at the FAIR facility at Darmstadt (Germany) to perform accurate tests of the strong interaction through bar pp and bar pA annihilation's studies. To track charged ...particles, two systems consisting of a set of planar, closed-packed, self-supporting straw tube layers are under construction. The PANDA straw tubes will have also unique characteristics in term of material budget and performance. They consist of very thin mylar-aluminized cathodes which are made self-supporting by means of the operation gas-mixture over-pressure. This solution allows to reduce at maximum the weight of the mechanical support frame and hence the detector material budget. The PANDA straw tube central tracker will not only reconstruct charged particle trajectories, but also will help in low momentum (< 1 GeV) particle identification via dE/dx measurements. This is a quite new approach that PANDA tracking group has first tested with detailed Monte Carlo simulations, and then with experimental tests of detector prototypes. This paper addresses the design issues of the PANDA straw tube trackers and the performance obtained in prototype tests.
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