Senior Thesis

Simulation Tools for the 2KM detector at the T2K Experiment

Thomas Corona

April 10, 2006

Thesis Committee: Chris Walter, Kate Scholberg, Ronen Plesser and Calvin Howell (exofficio non-voting member)

ABSTRACT:

This thesis presents tools used to analyze simulated neutral-current p0 events in the 2km water Cherenkov detector in the proposed T2K neutrino experiment. T2K is a long baseline experiment designed to measure neutrino oscillation parameters.  In water Cherenkov detectors, a large source of error in identifying ne  events arises from p0 --> gg   decays where only one g  is identified. I have created software that graphically displays the signals generated by each g  separately.  With these tools it will be possible to characterize the di®erences  between neutral-current p0 events and charged-current ne  events in the 2km water Cherenkov detector and Super- Kamiokande. This characterization will be used to improve existing reconstruction algorithms and further reduce these backgrounds.

Here is the thesis in PDF: Corona_thesis.pdf (about 3.08 MBytes)