Improving Particle Identification Capabilities of the STAR Detectors in the 2017 RHIC Run

One of the primary ways the spin structure of protons is studied is through polarized proton-proton (pp) collisions. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory is capable of producing such collisions, reaching center-of-mass energies of up to 510 GeV. These collisions produce high energy jets of particles whose polarization-dependent properties can be measured and analyzed to study nucleon spin structure. The Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) collaboration collects this collision data with detectors including the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) which tracks particle locations and measures energy loss (dE/dx) and the Time of Flight (TOF) detector which measures particle time of flight and calculates velocity (β). This information allows us to determine the particle species populating a given jet. In the 2017 RHIC run, four sections of the TOF lack timing resolutions, preventing their use in particle identification. In this study, we extract timing resolutions for these sections from the dE/dx vs 1/β distribution. We perform a 2D fit on this distribution in order to extract the expected 1/β and its resolution for each section. Both dE/dx and 1/β are analyzed to better identify particles when the distributions overlap at high momentum. We then apply a linear transformation to each of the resultant distributions to convert our 1/β resolution to timing resolution. We will present a status report on the effectiveness of this approach for pion identifications in the 2017 RHIC pp data.