The COMPASS experiment at CERN SPS measured in 2004 soft reactions
with a beam of negatively charged pions on various nuclear targets.
For this measurement, a silicon micro-strip telescope in the target
region was installed. For the first time 5 silicon detector stations
were operated simultaneously in the COMPASS experiment. A novel
method of time calibration, with the clustering algorithm accordingly
adapted, and refined alignment corrections were implemented in the
analysis software. The spatial resolution of a silicon detector was
determined to be 5 - 14 µm and the time resolution 2 - 3
ns. Combining the time information of the stations, a track time
resolution of 530 ps from the silicon telescope could be reached. One
focus of this experiment was the observation of Primakoff events when
pions scatter off the quasi-real photons of the Coulomb field of a
heavy nucleus. In case a real photon is produced, which corresponds to
Compton scattering in inverse kinematics, the pion polarisabilities
can be accessed. For the
observation of Primakoff events, it is important to get a precise
knowledge of the performance of the electron calorimeter. Therefore,
the instabilities of the calorimeter cells were studied. A data-driven
shower model was developed, which was used for a time-dependent
recalibration of the calorimeter. Furthermore, a cluster refitting
method was derived which is shown to recover position and energy of
clusters which contain passive or saturated cells and detects
double-hit clusters. The latter are important, as the main background
to the Primakoff Compton events stems from pi^0 misinterpreted as
single-photon hits. For the physics channel of interest, the obtained
statistics is discussed as well as the reasons why it was not
possible to extract polarisability values from the 2004 pilot run.
«
The COMPASS experiment at CERN SPS measured in 2004 soft reactions
with a beam of negatively charged pions on various nuclear targets.
For this measurement, a silicon micro-strip telescope in the target
region was installed. For the first time 5 silicon detector stations
were operated simultaneously in the COMPASS experiment. A novel
method of time calibration, with the clustering algorithm accordingly
adapted, and refined alignment corrections were implemented in the
analysis software....
»