Handling Difficult Towers in the Calibration of the PHENIX Muon Piston Calorimeter (MPC) for Analysis of RHIC Au+Au Collisions

The PHENIX Muon Piston Calorimeter (MPC) is an electromagnetic detector with a kinematic coverage of ($3.1<|\eta|<3.9$). This allows for measurements at high forward and backward pseudorapidity and will be used to measure transverse energy in $\sqrt{S_{NN}}$=200, 62.4, 39, and 7.7 GeV RHIC Au+Au collisions in this kinematic region. The towers will be calibrated by using an iterative procedure in which neutral pions are reconstructed from their decay photons. To augment the iterative process, rough calibrations of individual towers can be obtained by direct examination of ADC distributions. These rough calibrations serve as input to the more rigorous neutral pion reconstruction method and will be described in this poster.