Single pion and single photon simulation of photon multiplicity detector in ALICE

In this work, we have performed simulation using single particles, such as pions and photons, incident on the photon multiplicity detector (PMD). We have obtained the average analog to digital converter channels (ADC), average number of cells (Ncell) and average distance from the actual incident particle position to the centroid of the clusters for both pion clusters and photon clusters. We compared the results using the pion and electron beams at CERN SPS. The electron beam is taken instead of photon beam as it is impossible to have a photon beam. The goal of this study is to define the criteria to distinguish the photon clusters from the hadron clusters more efficiently by directly studying the photons instead of electron beam incident on PMD. Also studying the additional parameter of average distance from the centroid of the photon and pion clusters will make the discrimination criteria more robust which is missing from the test beam results. (author)