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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne
HK 61: Instrumentierung XII
HK 61.7: Talk
Thursday, March 24, 2011, 18:00–18:15, HS2
Pattern Recognition for the PANDA GEM-TPC — •Felix Boehmer — TU München
The PANDA fixed target experiment at the future FAIR facility in Darmstadt, Germany, will investigate fundamental questions of non-perturbative QCD. It will make use of a cooled, continuous antiproton beam (impinging on a hydrogen target) with momenta from 1.5 to 15 GeV/c, reaching a pp-annihilation rate of 2 · 107 s−1.
One option for the central tracker of the target spectrometer is a cylindrical, ungated, continuously running Time Projection Chamber (TPC) with GEM-based gas amplification stage. The chamber is designed to be 150 cm long with an outer radius of 41.5 cm and will be read out by ∼ 100.000 pickup electrodes.
In this setup, several thousand tracks will be stored inside the TPC volume at any given time, leading to sustained data rates of ∼ 50 GB s−1 in the TPC alone. On top of such technical challenges, PANDA is designed to run without a 1st-level hardware trigger, making powerful online data processing indispensable. Most importantly, in order to filter out interesting signatures from the purely time-stamped track data and associate information from different detectors uniquely to distinct physics events, fast and efficient online pattern recognition methods will play a central role.
Several methods, which are presently being studied - testing them on simulated data as well as data recently taken with a large GEM-TPC prototype (over 10.000 readout channels) - will be discussed, complemented by first results from simulated and real events.