Simulation of a prototype of the LDMX hadronic calorimeter and analysis of test beam data

Abstract: The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) is an upcoming experiment to test the existence of dark matter in the mass range of 1 MeV - 1 GeV. It does so by looking for missing momentum and energy in collisions of an electron beam and a tungsten target, which could potentially indicate the existence of dark matter. One of the main detector components of LDMX is the hadronic calorimeter, which is used to veto hadronic background events. As LDMX is still in the design and prototyping phase, a prototype hadronic calorimeter was built, and deployed for a test beam in April of 2022. This thesis is a contribution to the simulation of the hadronic calorimeter prototype and analysis of the test beam data. It involves verification of the simulation, modeling of the detector, simulation of the test beam data set, analysis preparation for the test beam, construction of the prototype, providing data quality management of the prototype, taking data with the prototype, and analysis of test beam results. Another component of LDMX is the trigger scintillator, which provides a count of the number of incoming electrons. A prototype of this instrument was also built and subjected to the test beam. As part of this thesis, the following contributions were made to the test beam efforts for the trigger scintillator: modeling of its three variants, simulation and preparatory analysis, data taking, and some rudimentary analysis of the test beam results.