Professor Claire Gwenlan

Abstract:

The ionization signals in the liquid argon of the ATLAS electromagnetic calorimeter are studied in detail using cosmic muons. In particular, the drift time of the ionization electrons is measured and used to assess the intrinsic uniformity of the calorimeter gaps and estimate its impact on the constant term of the energy resolution. The drift times of electrons in the cells of the second layer of the calorimeter are uniform at the level of 1.3% in the barrel and 2.8% in the endcaps. This leads to an estimated contribution to the constant term of (0.290.040.05)% in the barrel and (0.540.040.06)% in the endcaps. The same data are used to measure the drift velocity of ionization electrons in liquid argon, which is found to be 4.61±0.07 mm/μs at 88.5 K and 1 kV/mm. © 2010 CERN for the benefit of the ATLAS collaboration.

Abstract:

More than half a million minimum-bias events of LHC collision data were collected by the ATLAS experiment in December 2009 at centre-of-mass energies of 0.9 TeV and 2.36 TeV. This paper reports on studies of the initial performance of the ATLAS detector from these data. Comparisons between data and Monte Carlo predictions are shown for distributions of several track-and calorimeter-based quantities. The good performance of the ATLAS detector in these first data gives confidence for successful running at higher energies.

Abstract:

Charged particle production has been studied in neutral current deep inelastic ep scattering with the ZEUS detector at HERA using an integrated luminosity of 0.44 fb?1. Distributions of scaled momenta in the Breit frame are presented for particles in the current fragmentation region. The evolution of these spectra with the photon virtuality, Q2, is described in the kinematic region 10 < Q2< 41000Ge V2. Next-to-leading-order and modified leading-log-approximation QCD calculations as well as predictions from Monte Carlo models are compared to the data. The results are also compared to e+e? annihilation data. The dependences of the pseudorapidity distribution of the particles on Q2 and on the energy in the p system, W, are presented and interpreted in the context of the hypothesis of limiting fragmentation.

Abstract:

The simulation software for the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider is being used for large-scale production of events on the LHC Computing Grid. This simulation requires many components, from the generators that simulate particle collisions, through packages simulating the response of the various detectors and triggers. All of these components come together under the ATLAS simulation infrastructure. In this paper, that infrastructure is discussed, including that supporting the detector description, interfacing the event generation, and combining the GEANT4 simulation of the response of the individual detectors. Also described are the tools allowing the software validation, performance testing, and the validation of the simulated output against known physics processes. © 2010 CERN for the benefit of the ATLAS collaboration.