Signal Processing in the MicroBooNE LArTPC

The MicroBooNE experiment is designed to observe interactions of neutrinos with a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) detector from the on-axis Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) and off-axis Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beam at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The detector consists of a $2.5~m\times 2.3~m\times 10.4~m$ TPC including an array of 32 PMTs used for triggering and timing purposes. The TPC is housed in an evacuable and foam insulated cryostat vessel. It has a 2.5 m drift length in a uniform field up to 500 V/cm. There are 3 readout wire planes (U, V and Y co-ordinates) with a 3-mm wire pitch for a total of 8,256 signal channels. The fiducial mass of the detector is 60 metric tons of LAr. In a LArTPC, ionization electrons from a charged particle track drift along the electric field lines to the detection wire planes inducing bipolar signals on the U and V (induction) planes, and a unipolar signal collected on the (collection) Y plane. The raw wire signals are processed by specialized low-noise front-end readout electronics immersed in LAr which shape and amplify the signal. Further signal processing and digitization is carried out by warm electronics. We present the techniques by which the observed final digitized waveforms, which comprise the original ionization signal convoluted with detector field response and electronics response as well as noise, are processed to recover the original ionization signal in charge and time. The correct modeling of these ingredients is critical for further event reconstruction in LArTPCs.
Comment: Presentation at the DPF 2015 Meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields, Ann Arbor, Michigan, August 4-8, 2015