Research & Development for the BTeV Program

Syracuse University, Syracuse NY

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal requests support for R&D work on BTeV, a recently approved program at Fermilab. The collaborating university groups need R&D support to ensure that the BTeV detector is running at the same time as the European competition, LHCb at the CERN laboratory. BTeV is a program designed to challenge the Standard Model (SM) explanation of CP violation, mixing and rare decays in the b-quark and the c-quark systems. Exploiting the large numbers of b-quarks and c-quarks produced at the Tevatron collider requires a highly specialized detector, unconstrained by a central geometry that is prescribed to study high-transverse-momentum physics, and not limited by the relatively low production rate of b-quarks and c-quarks in electron-positron colliders. BTeV excels in several crucial areas including triggering on decays with purely hadronic final states, charged particle identification, electromagnetic calorimetry, and proper time resolution. Key features of BTeV include: (1) a dipole located at the IR, which gives BTeV an effective "two arm" acceptance, (2) a precision vertex detector based on planar pixel arrays, (3) a detached vertex trigger at level 1 that makes BTeV efficient for most final states, including purely hadronic modes, (4) excellent charged particle identification using a Ring Imaging Cherenkov Detector, (5) a high quality lead-tungstate electromagnetic calorimeter capable of reconstructing final states with single photons, p0's, h's, or h''s and of identifying electrons, (6) precision tracking using straw tubes and silicon microstrip detectors, which provide excellent momentum and mass resolution, (7) excellent identification of muons using a dedicated detector with the ability to supply a dimuon trigger, and (8) a very high speed and high throughput data acquisition system which eliminates the need to tune the experiment to specific final states.