ENERGY RECONSTRUCTION OF ELECTROMAGNETIC SHOWERS FROM pi(0) DECAYS WITH THE ICARUS T600 LIQUID ARGON TPC

We discuss the ICARUS T600 detector capabilities in electromagnetic shower reconstruction through the analysis of a sample of 212 events, coming from the 2001 Pavia surface test run, of hadronic interactions leading to the production of pi(0) mesons. Methods of shower energy and shower direction measurements were developed and the invariant mass of the photon pairs was reconstructed. The (gamma,gamma) invariant mass was found to be consistent with the value of the pi(0) mass. The resolution of the reconstructed pi(0) mass was found to be equal to 27.3%. An improved analysis, carried out in order to clean the full event sample from the events measured in the crowded environment, mostly due to the trigger conditions, gave a pi(0) mass resolution of 16.1%, significantly better than the one evaluated for the full event sample. The trigger requirement of the coincidence of at least four photo-multiplier signals favored the selection of events with a strong pile up of cosmic ray tracks and interactions. Hence a number of candidate pi(0) events were heavily contaminated by other tracks and had to be rejected. Monte Carlo simulations of events with pi(0) production in hadronic and neutrino interactions confirmed the validity of the shower energy and shower direction reconstruction methods applied to the real data.