Eur. Phys. J. C (2006) 48: 667-676
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-006-0051-3

Special Article - Tools for Experiment and Theory

Measurement of through-going particle momentum by means of multiple scattering with the ICARUS T600 TPC

¹ Institute of Theoretical Physics, Wrocław University, Wrocław, Poland
² Gruppo collegato INFN and Dipartimento di Fisica, Università dell’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy
³ Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) INFN, Assergi, Italy
⁴ Institute for Particle Physics, ETH Hönggerberg, Zürich, Switzerland
⁵ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Padova and INFN, Padova, Italy
⁶ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Milano and INFN, Milano, Italy
⁷ Dipartimento di Fisica Nucleare e Teorica, Università di Pavia and INFN, via Bassi 6, 27100, Pavia, Italy
⁸ Departamento de Física Teórica y del Cosmos and Centro Andaluz de Física de Partículas Elementales (CAFPE), Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain
⁹ Dipartimento di Scienze Fisiche, Università Federico II di Napoli and INFN, Napoli, Italy
¹⁰ CERN, Genève, Switzerland
¹¹ Dipartimento di Ingegneria Nucleare, Politecnico di Milano and INFN, Milano, Italy
¹² Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
¹³ H. Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kraków, Poland
¹⁴ Departamento de Investigacion Basica, CIEMAT, Madrid, Spain
¹⁵ Institute of Physics, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland
¹⁶ Institute of Experimental Physics, University of Warszawa, Warszawa, Poland
¹⁷ A. Sołtan Institute for Nuclear Studies, Warszawa, Poland
¹⁸ Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati (LNF) INFN, Frascati, Italy
¹⁹ Department of Electronics, AGH University of Science and Technology, Kraków, Poland
²⁰ INFN, Pisa, Italy
²¹ Institute of Radioelectronics, University of Warsaw, Warszawa, Poland

^* e-mail: a.bueno@ugr.es

Received: 2 June 2006
Revised: 31 August 2006
Published online: 24 October 2006

Abstract

The ICARUS collaboration has demonstrated, following the operation of a 600 ton (T600) detector at shallow depth, that the technique based on liquid argon time projection chambers is now mature. The study of rare events, not contemplated in the standard model, can greatly benefit from the use of this kind of detectors. In particular, a deeper understanding of atmospheric neutrino properties will be obtained thanks to the unprecedented quality of the data ICARUS provides. However if we concentrate on the T600 performance, most of the ν_μ charged current sample will be partially contained, due to the reduced dimensions of the detector. In this article, we address the problem of how well we can determine the kinematics of events having partially contained tracks. The analysis of a large sample of atmospheric muons collected during the T600 test run demonstrates that, in case the recorded track is at least one meter long, the muon momentum can be reconstructed by an algorithm that measures the multiple Coulomb scattering along the particle’s path. Moreover, we show that momentum resolution can be improved by almost a factor two using an algorithm based on the Kalman filtering technique.