Calibration Strategy for EMTiming

Overview

    The primary goal of the calibration table is to get rid of the dependence of timing information on channel to channel hardware differences. For channel timing information depends on energy (widely known as slewing corrections) because the system uses analog to digital signal discriminators (ASD) to convert analog signals from PMTs into digital LVDS signal.
    We plot  the  timing information for each channel  as a function of energy (more precisely as a function of total ADC counts), and fit it with empirical function.  The  resulting  function is applied to the data  during reconstruction.

    The most interesting events from physics point of view probably lie at high energies. Therefore it is important to get slewing curve right in the high energy region. It poses a problem because the number of events in the detector drops exponentially with energy, forcing us to use data averaged over many runs in order to collect good statistics in each channel at high energy tail.
    If one looks at the mean time dependence on the run number, one can notice that there are significant jitter on run by run basis. Therefor we adopt the following strategy.

Calibration Strategy

    From the mean time page we determine what runs can be used together for a single calibration slewing table. The selection is that one can draw a straight horizontal line through the selected runs. The resulting table is the slewing correction averaged over all selected run range. If this table is to be applied to the all data form selected runs, the resulting time distribution will be centered at zero.
     However, it is necessary to take into account run by run variations. After we apply slewing corrections to all channels we plot timing for the whole detector. The difference in the mean of that distribution from zero is recorded in the secondary table and will be applied to the data from that run at the reconstruction stage.


Page Maintained by: Max Goncharov