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)