2023 Abstract from Yashas

Developments on Wire Chambers and Beam Profile Monitoring

Student: Yashas Mattur

Scientist Mentors: Andrew Sonnenschein, Stefan Knirck

Fermilab’s Test Beam Facility (FTBF) creates and manipulates a focused beam of protons in order to produce particle collisions. Within the FTBF, there are 4 Wire Chambers whose purpose is to track the particles’ positions as they move through the beam. These Wire Chambers have a resolution of 1 square millimeter, and capture the protons’ presence as voltage signals along its wires. During the summer, I used OTSDAQ (a data acquisition system that can record the nature of the beam) to analyze and model interactions within the beam. For this, I had to learn C++ to work with the interactions between the system’s interfaces in order to produce models of the spatial distribution of protons in the beam.

Scientists at Fermilab must know the exact distributions of particles in a proton beam. However, this distribution is often distorted by outside factors. Fermilab’s Beam Profile Monitor tracks such distortions with a diode board at the end of a proton beam; each diode on the board signals the presence of a proton by letting extra current flow through it when a proton hits and damages it. However, through an analysis of the voltages on the diode board, it’s evident that a significant amount of external radio frequency noise is “hiding” the relatively small true signals from the protons. To eliminate this noise, I conducted a correlational analysis of the voltage data on the diodes to find the noise, filtered it out, and used a Savitzky-Golay filter to smooth the data, thereby uncovering the true underlying proton signal from the Beam Profile Monitor.