Classifier for centrality determination with Zero Degree Calorimeter at the Cooling-Storage-Ring External-target Experiment

Abstract: The Zero Degree Calorimeter (ZDC) plays a crucial role in determining centrality at the Cooling-Storage-Ring External-target Experiment (CEE) in the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL). A Boosted Decision Trees (BDT) multi-classification algorithm is employed to classify the centrality of the collision events based on the raw features from ZDC such as the number of fired channels and deposited energy. The data from simulated $\rm ^{238}U$ + $\rm ^{238}U$ collisions at 500 $\rm MeV/u$, generated by the IQMD event generator and subsequently modeled through the GEANT4 package, is employed to train and test the BDT model. The results showed the high accuracy of the multi-classification model adopted in ZDC for centrality determination, which is robust against variations in different factors of detector geometry and response. The study demonstrates a good performance of the CEE-ZDC for determining the centrality in nucleus-nucleus collisions.