Juan Estrada

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As a Research Assistant at University of Rochester, I joined the D collaboration in March 1998. During my first months at Fermilab, I participated in several aspects of the construction of the D Central Fiber Tracker (CFT). This detector consists of 80,000 scintillating fibers used for reconstructing charged-particle trajectories in the D detector. I worked on the development of cassettes for the Visible Light Photon Counters (VLPC). The cassettes are the structures that house the VLPCs that are used to readout the CFT, and I studied the reliability of different components that were being considered for the cassettes. The mechanical positioning of the fibers in the detector required a precision of ! 100 μm. For this reason, we developed a quality control system for measuring the positions of the fibers glued together in ribbons. I tested the hardware and developed the software to control this machine, which operated successfully for more than a year, and allowed us to build the detector within the required specifications. During this period I also tested organic scintillator panels and phototubes that were being assembled for a cosmic ray test of the CFT and Preshower detectors.These hardware projects introduced me to many different aspects of experimental particle physics. We set up a test stand to study and characterize the VLPC cassettes, and I participated in all aspects of this project. I worked first with prototype cassettes and, later, characterized each of the 1024 channels in each of the 100 cassettes needed for the D detector. These tests corresponded to the last step in the quality control of the cassettes to be installed in the detector, and it was my main responsibility for over 2 years. We had to build a data acquisition system for this test stand that included all the main components of the design of the D detector, and became a test of the functionality of several of these components. The characterization of the VLPC