Progress Report


Geant4 simulation update

- code consists of 116 files and ~11k lines ( comments are not taken into account), see http://dilbert.physics.wm.edu/elog/Software/122 for details.
- current stable version: v50 (since last weekend)
    - includes:    target, collimators,  minitorus coils and field, main magnet coils and field, dual VDCs, handle bar detector
    - the drift cells geometry is parameterized (height, width, length, and angle) and is defined by an input file
    - the location and tilt angle of the VDCs and Cerenkov detector are defined by an input file.
    - different approaches to define the magetic field  as local fields bound to the location of the coils have failed, the field of the mini torus was always ignored by Geant4.
       Took a while to figure this out since the field effects of the mini torus are small.Working solution is a global magnetic field manager, which  simply summes up the  two fields.
    -  Besides my misunderstanding of the non cross section weighted Q2 entry in the PAW ntuple I found a bug in my Q2 extraction 
         ( q2 instead of q2[0], see http://dilbert.physics.wm.edu/elog/Software/116)
              - for a correct cross section weighting the weight factcor (weight_n) is now included in Geant4
 
 - I was plagued by segementation faults for the last weeks when I tried to run with the full geometry for more than ~3500 events. Even used a two day evaluation
    license of a professional debugger (insure++ , $8000 license) but without success. After the code was clean up (e.g. header files, pointer initialization) and Root
    was downgraded from developer to production version  it does not crash anymore. However there is still a memory leakage problem when I disable cerenkov light production
    in the simulation.

- with the current Qweak setup beeing implemented in Geant4 I took a look on the hit distribubtion of VDC (http://dilbert.physics.wm.edu/elog/Software/124).
   A coarse estimation of the active area is 78"x18" with a very generous safety margin. I have to test if the VDC frame can be hit by ajacent octants which gives me an upper
  limit of the overall length.

- Just finished: wire spacing:
   simulations were done with different wire distance between 25/64" and 32/64" with a  stepping size of 1/64".
   Sorry , have not made a multigraph plot yet (http://dilbert.physics.wm.edu/elog/Software/119). The hit distribution is fine for a cell width smaller than 29/64". For a higher
   wire spacing you get unwanted 3 cell hits . . .
 
- pending simualtion issuses:
      - including a real main magnet environment, e.g. coil support plate sticking into the octant (http://dilbert.physics.wm.edu/elog/Software/125)
      - including the shielding wall , therefore we need the the location and size of the cutouts
      - including the beamline and "precollimator"
      - an independent (in)elastic event generator
               
Drawings

After the extraction of the active area I have started to produce engineering drawings of the wire chamber frames with SolidWorks. We have drawings of various drift chambers (Hall A VDC,
HKS, SOS, Region 2 (Norm), and MAMI)  and I'm using them as templates for my drawings. So far I have done drawings of the alu baseplate and the HV frame.
They are not final but good enough for an engineering review at JLab (http://dilbert.physics.wm.edu/elog/Construction/78).
The drawings are "dynamic and parameterized", means that if I have to change the dimensions of the chambers,  the position of the grooves and holes will change accordingly (e.g. the groove has a 2in distance to the outer frame size, 29 holes in the horizontal direction with relative positions).
At present I'm working on the gas flow channels and the alignment of the O-rings needed for stacking the frames without interference (http://dilbert.physics.wm.edu/elog/Construction/79)
I expect to have a full drawing package ready for the next quarter since the bulk part of the Geant4 package is mostly completed for my purpose.

Clean Room

Will be hooked up mid/end of April according to the facility management ...


That's all folks