Commissioning of the Mu2e tracker DAQ, planning for the Vertical Slice Test and pre-pattern recognition studies

Mu2e will search for neutrino-less coherent muon-electron conversion in the field of an Al nucleus and the signal is a 105 MeV conversion electron (CE). The straw tracker is one of the most important Mu2e subsystems. This Thesis presents a comprehensive study of the tracker. I contributed to the commissioning of the tracker DAQ system from both hardware and software perspectives and the Vertical Slice Test (VST). The VST encompasses the entire testing chain, from the straws to the readout, to processed data on disk. I validated the firmware through Monte Carlo simulations to confirm functionality, monitoring data quality from the tracker front-end electronics, assessing overall DAQ performance to ensure reliability during future calibration and data-taking. The ultimate goal is to perform a time calibration of the first assembled station of the tracker using cosmics, aiming for a longitudinal hit position resolution better than 4 cm. I performed a study to determine the impact of the station orientation on the quality of the calibration. Given the high data volume expected during Mu2e operations, estimated at approximately 7 PB/year, optimizing memory usage and CPU consumption are critical. A challenge lies in flagging δ-electron hits, which are the primary source of hits in the tracker, without compromising the efficiency of CE reconstruction. For this reason, I also focused on pre-pattern recognition studies, to explore the methods for identifying δs during data taking.