Title
Measurement of the muon lifetime and the Michel spectrum in the LAGO water Cherenkov detectors as a tool to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio
Date Issued
01 November 2023
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Taboada A.
Asorey H.
Sidelnik I.
Fauth A.
Publisher(s)
Elsevier B.V.
Abstract
The Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO) consists of a network of water Cherenkov detectors (WCDs) installed in the Latin American region at various latitudes, from Sierra Negra in Mexico, 18°59′ N 97°18′ W to the Antarctic Peninsula, 64°14′ S 56°38′ W and altitudes from Lima, Peru at 20m a.s.l. to Chacaltaya, Bolivia at 5500m a.s.l. The detectors of the network are built from commercial water tanks, so they have several geometries (cylindrical in general) and different water purification methods. All these features generate different profiles in the response to air shower particles measured by our detectors and produce pulse-shaped electronic signals. Common sources of noise in a WCD come from light leakage, electronic noise, and noise associated with the operation of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) such as thermionic emission and after-pulses; they all could produce detectable pulses recorded by the LAGO data acquisition (DAQ) system. In LAGO WCDs, these noise signals are expected to present a short pulse width (of a few nanoseconds), while secondary radiation typically produces pulses of several tens of nanoseconds. We used data from the LAGO DAQ system, which digitises pulses at 40MHz sampling rate on windows of 300ns (12 temporal bins) and with a 10-bit resolution. The LAGO DAQ configuration uses a single threshold-based trigger in the third temporal bin. We proposed a secondary trigger threshold at the fourth bin to improve the noise rejection. In this work, we show how the optimal values for these triggers are now obtained from the measurement of the muon lifetime within the water volume and the resulting Michel spectrum. Our results were also simulated using the LAGO ARTI simulation framework to estimate the expected flux of secondary particles at the detector site; and the Meiga framework, a Geant4-based simulator used to estimate the WCDs response to the atmospheric radiation flux.
Volume
1056
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Oceanografía, Hidrología, Recursos hídricos
Sensores remotos
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85167964243
Source
Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment
ISSN of the container
01689002
Sponsor(s)
This work was partly carried out within the ‘European Open Science Cloud - Expanding Capacities by building Capabilities’(EOSC-SYNERGY) project, co-funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 RI Programme under Grant Agreement n°857647. We acknowledge the ICTP, Italy and OIEA grant NT-17 that partially funded stays to carry out this work. Also ProCiencia through 139-2017 grant and Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería, Peru through grant FC-FI-11-2020 for partially funded detectors development. The LAGO Collaboration is very thankful to all the participating institutions and to the Pierre Auger Collaboration for their continuous support.
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Comisión Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo Aeroespacial