SYSTEMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE PSI EXPERIMENT TO DIRECTLY MEASURE THE STICKING PROBABILITY OMEGA-S IN DT FUSION

Starting in 1989 an experiment was run at PSI to directly measure the final sticking probability in muon catalyzed dt fusion. This experiment was based on an ''active-target'' ionization chamber (IC) built at Gatchina, Russia, and an array of plastic neutron counters. In three runs approximately 5 x 10(6) isolated alpha signals were recorded with around one half of these occurring in the inner chamber region where we have more complete understanding of the systematic errors. Particularly from a long run in 1992 we were able to obtain a very clean sticking peak of some 5000 mualpha events. However, to reach an accurate value of sticking, all systematic effects and several major backgrounds had to be understood in detail. To this end a Monte Carlo code was written to simulate the full electrostatic environment of the IC and to recreate completely each signal type including the actual tritium decay noise from the live experiment. A slightly model dependent value of approx. 0.56 +/- 0.04% is obtained for final sticking.