The Time Projection Chamber of the HARP Experiment

The hadron production experiment HARP aims to measure hadron collision cross sections with a 2-15 GeV particle beam and several targets. This energy regime is in a borderline zone between the low energy region dominated by resonance formation and the high energy domain where perturbative Quantum Chromo Dynamics is applicable. The emphasis of this master thesis is put on the HARP central tracker, the Time Projection Chamber (TPC). In the thesis work, Finite Element Method computations of the electric field in critical regions of the TPC have been performed to provide design input concerning the electrostatic configuration of the field cages and of the wire chamber. A first step in the chain of reconstruction of the information produced by the detector is the equalisation and monitoring of about 4000 analogue signals. An algorithm that processes the raw digitised signals, filters out electronics noise and extracts the pad gain from signal distributions has been produced and analysed for this purpose. The algorithm has been verified with independent calibration procedures and is now applied in the HARP reconstruction software. The thesis is concluded with a first glance at the reconstructed physics data from the HARP Time Projection Chamber.