Signal clustering in pixel detector

[dforshaw]

Hi all

I am relitivly new to programming.

I work with silicon sensors, made of many thousands of pixels.

Background:
The pixels are very small and very close together so charge sharing occurs between pixels surrounding an event ( a particle passing through the sensor). The sensor has the structure of 16x128 pixels.

I use Root as a compiler and c++ to do various calculations that take the data and prepare it for analysis.

I need to find a away of finding clusters of signal. the size of the cluster and the number of those particular cluster sizes. I have very little idea how i would go about doing this!

Any help on the matter would be great

Cheers

[hamsterman]

You'll have to state the task more clearly. If I understand correctly, you have a bunch of pixels which get charged when a particle passes through them. And when that happens you want to get the area affected by particle, or a number of such areas? In what form would application get all the charges?

[dforshaw]

Sorry if my previous post wasn't very clear, but you are correct in your understanding. Although the area of the cluster isn't important, what is is the size of the cluster, ie how many pixels it contains.

During an event charge will be deposited in the sensor, most of the charge will be in a single pixel named the "seed" with the surrounding pixels sharing some of the charge deposited.
I want to know the size of the cluster, how many pixels have a signal.
I then want to look at the total charge of the cluster. This is just the combined signal from all pixels in the cluster.

And the reason this is being done is to compare how the sensor behaves before and after heavy irradiation.

Cheers