CAREER: Commissioning, Calibration, and Data Analysis of NOvA Detectors

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This CAREER award will enable the PI, Patricia Vahle, Assistant Professor of Physics at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, to participate in the commissioning and operation of the NOvA Integration Prototype Near Detector (IPND). This CAREER program describes a plan of research with realistic potential for broader impact which takes good advantage of the PI's experience and expertise and positions the PI to make a significant contribution to NOvA in the areas of calibration and data analysis, areas which are obviously important too for future particle physics experiments. The IPND will be installed on the surface at Fermilab starting in the summer of 2010, providing a test bed for the NOvA detector design and systems integration. After a year of running on the surface, the detector will be disassembled and reinstalled underground, becoming the NOvA near detector. The neutrino data collected with the detector allow for the development of detector calibration techniques, signal versus background separation algorithms, and tests of the simulation of nuclear hadronization and reinteraction processes, all of which are crucial to the success of the experiment. Within the broader impact, the project will be a training ground for undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoc. The IPND program offers ample short term hardware and analysis projects, ideally suited to an undergraduate summer research experience. To ensure a vibrant scientific program into the future, one needs to capture the imagination of students well before they enter college. To that end, Vahle proposes providing local high school and middle school teachers the opportunity to participate in summer research projects on site at Fermilab. In the summers she is in Williamsburg, she would exploit the relationship developed between the W&M neutrino group and the local school teachers by employing a teacher for several weeks over the summer to help develop, then implement, science events.