Control and supervision of a time projection chamber with GEM readout

To get a deeper understanding of the structure of nucleons and the strong interaction binding the constituents inside, the CBELSA/TAPS experiment investigates the resonance spectrum of baryons by meson photoproduction within the scope of the SFB/TRR 16 ''Subnuclear Structure of Matter''. In order to support and expand the physical program, the existing Inner Detector will be replaced by a Time Projection Chamber (TPC) within the next few years. This allows for the detection of charged reaction channels, which can't be measured with the CBELSA/TAPS experiment up to now, as well as for particle identification from the specific energy loss. A First prototype with GEM foils for charge amplification in front of the readout plane and suitable size for the CBELSA/TAPS experiment was built in collaboration with the TU Munich, the detector laboratory of the GSI in Darmstadt and the Stefan-Meyer-Institute of the University Vienna. The TPC has been commissioned successfully within the FOPI experiment at the GSI during several test beam campaigns. Additionally, systematic studies have been carried out with a smaller Test-TPC using a TestBench providing an accurate external track definition. As the electron drift velocity in the TPC volume is a crucial parameter for the exact track reconstruction, detailed simulations of the drift velocity and its dependency on external parameters, such as drift voltage, pressure, gas flow or temperature, have been carried out. The results of these simulations recommend a constant monitoring of all examined parameters to allow a reasonable use of the simulated drift velocities. For this purpose, and to ensure a safe and stable operation of the TPCs and the other detectors on the TestBench, the required hardware, the control software based on a data base and a graphical user interface were designed and constructed as the main part of this work. With this so-called SlowControl, it was possible to measure, control and store several parameters - e.g. voltages, currents, temperatures or gas flows - with high precision during the beam times and test measurements carried out. The SlowControl- GUI features a good handling and a display of the measured values in real-time. From the data recorded with the GEM-TPC, the actual drift velocities of the electrons within the detector volume have been extracted and compared with the theoretical predictions of the simulation. Hence, the error in the reconstruction of the z component was minimized thus, improving further analysis of the data.