History: BigBite

The BigBite spectrometer is a large momentum and angular acceptance, non-focusing spectrometer consisting of a large dipole magnet (maximum field of 1.2T) and detector set. These detectors consist of three multiple wire drift chambers, a scintillator plane, and two lead-glass calorimeters. The original spectrometer was acquired by Jefferson Lab from NIKEF and the detector package was replaced for use in the Hall A GEn experiment.

The current configuration allows for solid angle acceptance of nominally 75msr and momentum resolution of approximately 1~2% sigma. The tracking code works mainly with the wire hits in the MWDCs, using the rest of the detector set to give hints on eliminating noise in the system. Noise becomes a significant
factor in doing tracking as the noise to signal ratio for a production environment has been observed to be on the order of 10. This presents a significant challenge to perform efficient and fast tracking.