Liquid argon calorimeter concept for the heavy-ion charge state separation.

Vivid evolution of modern rare isotope beam facilities like FRIB is the lifeblood of experimental equipment development. Increasing demands on precise and efficient particle identification, as well as fragment charge-state separation, motivate the development of novel technologies. I report here the development of an innovative detector concept for charge-state identification of heavy-nuclei, based on a liquid argon (LAr) calorimeter with optical readout. Although, Liquid-Ar based calorimetry has been successfully used in high-energy particle physics for many years (e.g. ICARUS [1], MicroBoone [2], Dune [3]), its extension to heavy-ion beams brings new challenges: e.g. non-linearity of light-output vs. energy-deposited; energy straggling; vacuum/cryogenic interfaces; etc.

In this presentation, I will discuss the development of a LAr-based calorimeter prototype at FRIB to identify heavy-ion charge states. I will focus on three main aspects: (1) Efforts to establish an efficient way to record the argon scintillation light; (2) Studies of vacuum-UV light-sensitive devices, such as photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) and silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs); (3) Studies of various wave-length shifting materials, like polyethylene naphthalate (PEN), tetraphenyl butadiene (TPB) and Pb-based perovskite quantum dots, in the scope of heavy-ion calorimetry.

[1] P. Benetti et al., A three-ton liquid argon time projection chamber, Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A 332 (1993) 395–412

[2] R. Acciarri et al., Design and construction of the MicroBooNE detector, Journal of Instrumentation 12 (2017) P02017

[3] The DUNE Collaboration, The DUNE Far Detector Interim Design Report, Volume 1: Physics, Technology and Strategies, (2018)