Estimation of the systematic uncertainties of the measurement of the neutrino mixing angle θ13 related to the trigger system of the Double Chooz experiment

The Double Chooz experiment, located in the Ardennes region next to the CHOOZ-B nuclear power plant, is a reactor antineutrino experiment to measure neutrino oscillations. It has been designed as precision experiment to measure the neutrino mixing angel θ13 with highest possible accuracy due to its small value close to zero. The electron antineutrino flux emitted by the reactor cores is measured by two identical neutrino detectors located at different distances from the reactor cores. Each detector consist of a 10.3 m3 target volume filled with liquid scintillator and surrounded by 390 photomultiplier tubes. The far detector is located 1.05 km away from the reactor cores to be most sensitive to oscillation effects. The unoscillated neutrino flux is measured by the near detector located 400 m away from the reactor cores. In order to reduce background events and other sources resulting in systematic uncertainties, special requirements have been demanded for all detector components and electronic systems. In this context, a most efficiently operating data acquisition system is essential. The subsystem responsible to start data storage for events of interest is the so called ''trigger system''. The design concept of the Double Chooz trigger system introduces two redundancy concepts in order to trigger the data acquisition in the most robust and efficient way: The trigger decision is based on a combination of an energy threshold and the number of active photomultiplier tubes (multiplicity condition). Secondly, the system is divided into two identical but independently operating subsystems for most robust operations of the full system. Additionally, the two subsystem provide the possibility to measure the efficiency of the system. Apart from generating the trigger signal for the data acquisition, the system provides an online event classification in order to adjust the amount of stored data for each event type. After one and a half year of data taking the Double Chooz collaboration presented a best- fit value of sin2(2θ13)=0.109±0.030(stat.)±0.025(syst.) by performing an analysis on the measured neutrino rate and spectral shape. In this thesis the performance of the trigger system during this data taking period is analyzed. The main focus is set on an analysis to determine the trigger efficiency of the system. Furthermore, the impact of the obtained results with respect to the final analysis to determine θ13 is presented and discussed.