A Request for Infrastructure Support for the MECO Project

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This is a proposal for infrastructure support in order to continue the work of the Houston group in developing the Muon to Electron Conversion (MECO) (AGS Experiment 940) tracking detector. Traditionally, support for the group's research has been obtained from the US Department of Energy - Nuclear Sciences. However, it appears unlikely that infrastructure funds to support personnel working on MECO will continue from this source. NSF is currently providing support for materials and equipment. The MECO experiment is one of two experiments which constitute the Rare Symmetry Violating Processes (RSVP) physics program currently under development by the NSF. RSVP is a Major Research Equipment (MRE) program, approved by the National Science Board in February 2001, and currently scheduled to begin construction in FY 2006. The program is at present in an R&D phase, supported by R&RA funds from the Division of Physics. Intellectual Merit One of the principal intellectual endeavors in current physics exploration is the search for new physics beyond the Standard Model, and there are good reasons to believe that the Standard Model is at best incomplete. For example, the hierarchy of elementary particle masses has no explanation. Further, the recent observation of neutrino mixing requires at least a revision of the Standard Model to allow mass mixing in the lepton as well as the quark sector. The MECO experiment is a search for violation of Lepton Flavor in the charged lepton sector via the direct conversion of a muon to an electron within the field of an atomic nucleus. The proposed sensitivity of this experiment is three-to-four orders of magnitude below current limits; well below the levels predicted by several extensions to the Standard Model, including Supersymmetry.The University of Houston is the sub-system manager for the MECO tracking detector. This tracker measures the energy of the ejected conversion electrons and is crucial to background rejection and the ultimate sensitivity of the experiment. It is composed of a cylindrical, thin-walled, straw-tube composite, ~290 cm long and ~88 cm in diameter. The proposed project will fund infrastructure so that work can proceed along three parallel paths: (1) development of computer models, calibrated to small prototype detectors, to simulate the electronic response of the detector, (2) study of the mechanical design and construction techniques required to produce a full-scale detector, and (3) development of readout electronics capable of data acquisition at the expected singles rates, digitization, and presentation for event storage in a computer buffer. Broader ImpactsThis proposal will provide support for the education of students in both physics and modern distributed signal processing. The MECO international collaboration consists of eleven institutions, and the Houston group is presently discussing cooperative participation in the integrated circuit development with Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the Engineering Physics Department at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. It also appears that the development of the proposed rescaled digitizing integrated circuit (IC) can find application in many high-rate, multi-channel data acquisition applications from non-destructive testing to medicine.