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FOCUS at CU

FOCUS Spectrometer

The FOCUS (Fotoproduction of Charm with an Upgraded Spectrometer) experiment is a continuation of Fermilab experiment E687. It utilized a multi-particle large aperture spectrometer to reconstructed charged particles traveling through two dipole magnets. It also contained 3 multi-cell threshold Cerenkov counters, two electromagnetic calorimeters, one hadronic calorimeter, and two muon systems for particle identification and triggering. Between September 1996 and August 1997 the data acquisition system recorded 7 billion events onto 8 mm tapes. From this, more than 1 million fully reconstructed charm events were obtained for analysis. This has led to more than 60 peer-reviewed published papers since July, 2000.

CU contributions

Professor John Cumalat has been FOCUS co-spokesperson since the project proposal.

The University of Colorado group built and operated the inner electromagnetic calorimeter. The 800 lead glass blocks were obtained from a previous experiment and reconditioned at Colorado. Each of the lead glass blocks were connected with optical epoxy to a phototube.

CU was also involved in the construction of the target silicon detector which consisted of 4 new silicon strip detector layers.

The second phase of data processing, skim 2, was split 50/50 between Vanderbilt and CU. At each institutions approximately 3000 tapes were read, analysis performed, and written out into 6 streams, approximately 300 tapes each.

More than a dozen peer reviewed publications are a direct result of work at CU and were written by people at CU.

Current CU FOCUS members

Past CU FOCUS members


Questions? Email Kevin Stenson at .