Welcome to the PRT Home Page (Proton Remnant Tagger)

Under construction..., most links should work,though..., but... I still don't have a PRT icon!

How to use the PRT

If you don't know what the PRT actually is, you might find this ZEUS note useful, which describes the PRT hardware in 1994. The physical setup hasn't changed since. The readout electronics has changed, though, but you don't want to worry about that. However, the routines used to access actual PRT data have changed quite a bit.

This page describes how to use PRT1 and PRT2 in physics analysis. Example plots of pulse height distributions and timing are included as postscript files and should help motivating the recommended cuts used to define a hit in the PRT.

Hardware of PRT1 and PRT2

The PRT hardware is described in detail here. The geometrical acceptance of the counters with respect to the ZEUS calorimeter and HERA beamline elements are shown here. For each channel the pulse height and the arrival time of the photomultiplier signals are being recorded.

Note: Units used throughout this page are pC for pulse height and ns for timing.

Pulse height spectra

Pulse height spectra have to show clear MIP signals in order to define cuts which separate signals induced by particles from noise. The position of these MIP peaks varies with time, sometimes they seem indistinguishable from the noise peak centered around 0 pC. Therefore, the cuts are different for different run periods (see below).

Typical pulse height spectra are shown here with the recommended cuts.

Timing distributions

The timing distributions show signals that are clearly not in time with events coming from the interaction region. To exclude such events, timing cuts have to be applied also.

Find code which extracts PRT data (physics data and Monte Carlo) and recommended cut pulse height and timing cuts for the different years below.

last update: July 4, 1997

Any questions? Complaints? Just wanna say 'hi'? Don't hesitate, I'm looking forward to hearing from you, in any case.

K. Desler