Verification of a novel calorimeter concept for studies of charmonium states

PhD ceremony: Mr. E. Guliyev, 12.45 uur, Aula Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen

Dissertation: Verification of a novel calorimeter concept for studies of charmonium states

Promotor(s): prof. H. Löhner

Faculty: Mathematics and Natural Sciences

Particle physics has revealed the fundamental and elementary constituents of matter, quarks and leptons. However, it remains a challenge to understand how composite particles like nucleons, the building blocks of atomic nuclei, can gain their mass from massless constituents. Insight is best obtained by studying composite systems containing a heavy “charm” quark, or by demonstrating a predicted new “exotic” type of composite systems with yet unobserved quark combinations. Such systems can be produced through intense antimatter annihilations at the new accelerator complex FAIR (Germany) in the near future. The systems of interest have to be studied with high-precision particle beams but also with detectors of ultimate accuracy. Photons of high energy, which are among the most abundant decay products of the short-lived charm- or exotic particles, will be measured in a large crystal spectrometer. Essential electronic components of such a detector and the corresponding analysis techniques have been developed and studied in this thesis. A new approach to precisely evaluate the large amount of measured signals in programmed chip-arrays and to exactly determine their characteristic features has been verified in various experiments using accelerated particles and cosmic rays. The results presented in this thesis demonstrate that a large data rate can be reliably and precisely processed, which is mandatory to investigate a huge amount of annihilation events. The logic components and program elements have been fitted to commercially available devices. Interest in our developments has been shown from a commercial company and foreign experimental groups.