Aliaga, R. J., Herrero-Bosch, V., Capra, S., Pullia, A., Duenas, J. A., Grassi, L., et al. (2015). Conceptual design of the TRACE detector readout using a compact, dead time-less analog memory ASIC. Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res. A, 800, 34–39.
Abstract: The new TRacking Array for light Charged particle Ejectiles (TRACE) detector system requires monitorization and sampling of all pulses in a large number of channels with very strict space and power consumption restrictions for the front-end electronics and cabling, Its readout system is to be based on analog memory ASICs with 64 channels each that sample a 1 μs window of the waveform of any valid pulses at 200 MHz while discarding any other signals and are read out at 50 MHz with external ADC digitization. For this purpose, a new, compact analog memory architecture is described that allows pulse capture with zero dead time in any channel while vastly reducing the total number of storage cells, particularly for large amounts of input channels. This is accomplished by partitioning the typical Switched Capacitor Array structure into two pipelined, asymmetric stages and introducing FIFO queue-like control circuitry for captured data, achieving total independence between the capture and readout operations.
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Marco-Hernandez, R., Alves, D., Angoletta, M. E., Marqversen, O., Molendijk, J., Oponowicz, E., et al. (2017). The AD and ELENA orbit, trajectory and intensity measurement systems. J. Instrum., 12, P07024–24pp.
Abstract: This paper describes the new Antiproton Decelerator (AD) orbit measurement system and the Extra Low ENergy Antiproton ring (ELENA) orbit, trajectory and intensity measurement system. The AD machine at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is presently being used to decelerate antiprotons from 3.57 GeV/c to 100 MeV/c for matter vs anti-matter comparative studies. The ELENA machine, presently under commissioning, has been designed to provide an extra deceleration stage down to 13.7 MeV/c. The AD orbit system is based on 32 horizontal and 27 vertical electrostatic Beam Position Monitor (BPM) fitted with existing low noise front-end amplifiers while the ELENA system consists of 24 BPMs equipped with new low-noise head amplifiers. In both systems the front-end amplifiers generate a difference (delta) and a sum (sigma) signal which are sent to the digital acquisition system, placed tens of meters away from the AD or ELENA rings, where they are digitized and further processed. The beam position is calculated by dividing the difference signal by the sum signal either using directly the raw digitized data for measuring the turn-by-turn trajectory in the ELENA system or after down-mixing the signals to baseband for the orbit measurement in both machines. The digitized sigma signal will be used in the ELENA system to calculate the bunched beam intensity and the Schottky parameters with coasting beam after passing through different signal processing chain. The digital acquisition arrangement for both systems is based on the same hardware, also used in the ELENA Low Level Radio Frequency (LLRF) system, which follows the VME Switched Serial (VXS) enhancement of the Versa Module Eurocard 64x extension (VME64x) standard and includes VITA 57 standard Field Programmable Gate Array Mezzanine Card (FMC). The digital acquisition Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) andDigital Signal Processor (DSP) firmware sharesmany common functionalities with the LLRF system but has been tailored for this measurement application in particular. Specific control and acquisition software has been developed for these systems. Both systems are installed in AD and ELENA. The AD orbit system currently measures the orbit in AD while the ELENA system is being used in the commissioning of the ELENA ring.
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Agramunt, J. et al, Tain, J. L., Albiol, F., Algora, A., Domingo-Pardo, C., Jordan, M. D., et al. (2016). Characterization of a neutron-beta counting system with beta-delayed neutron emitters. Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res. A, 807, 69–78.
Abstract: A new detection system for the measurement of beta-delayed neutron emission probabilities has been characterized using fission products with well known beta-delayed neutron emission properties. The setup consists of BELEN-20, a 4 pi-neutron counter with twenty He-3 proportional tubes arranged inside a large polyethylene neutron moderator, a thin Si detector for beta counting and a self-triggering digital data acquisition system. The use of delayed-neutron precursors with different neutron emission windows allowed the study of the effect of energy dependency on neutron, beta and beta-neutron rates. The observed effect is well reproduced by Monte Carlo simulations. The impact of this dependency on the accuracy of neutron emission probabilities is discussed. A new accurate value of the neutron emission probability for the important delayed-neutron precursor I-137 was obtained, P-n = 7.76(14)%.
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Gololo, M. G. D., Carrio Argos, F., & Mellado, B. (2022). Tile Computer-on-Module for the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter Phase-II upgrades. J. Instrum., 17(6), P06020–14pp.
Abstract: The Tile PreProcessor (TilePPr) is the core element of the Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) off-detector electronics for High-luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). The TilePPr comprises FPGA-based boards to operate and read out the TileCal on-detector electronics. The Tile Computer on Module (TileCoM) mezzanine is embedded within TilePPr to carry out three main functionalities. These include remote configuration of on-detector electronics and TilePPr FPGAs, interface the TilePPr with the ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition (TDAQ) system, and interfacing the TilePPr with the ATLAS Detector Control System (DCS) by providing monitoring data. The TileCoM is a 10-layer board with a Zynq UltraScale+ ZU2CG for processing data, interface components to integrate with TilePPr and the power supply to be connected to the Advanced Telecommunication Computing Architecture carrier. A CentOS embedded Linux is deployed on the TileCoM to implement the required functionalities for the HL-LHC. In this paper we present the hardware and firmware developments of the TileCoM system in terms of remote programming, interface with ATLAS TDAQ system and DCS system.
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Esteve, R., Toledo, J., Monrabal, F., Lorca, D., Serra, L., Mari, A., et al. (2012). The trigger system in the NEXT-DEMO detector. J. Instrum., 7, C12001–9pp.
Abstract: NEXT-DEMO is a prototype of NEXT (Neutrino Experiment with Xenon TPC), an experiment to search for neutrino-less double beta decay using a 100 kg radio-pure, 90 % enriched (136Xe isotope) high-pressure gaseous xenon TPC with electroluminescence readout. The detector is based on a PMT plane for energy measurements and a SiPM tracking plane for topological event filtering. The experiment will be located in the Canfranc Underground Laboratory in Spain. Front-end electronics, trigger and data-acquisition systems (DAQ) have been built. The DAQ is an implementation of the Scalable Readout System (RD51 collaboration) based on FPGA. Our approach for trigger is to have a distributed and reconfigurable system in the DAQ itself. Moreover, the trigger allows on-line triggering based on the detection of primary or secondary scintillation light, or a combination of both, that arrives to the PMT plane.
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ATLAS Collaboration(Aad, G. et al), Aparisi Pozo, J. A., Bailey, A. J., Cabrera Urban, S., Castillo, F. L., Castillo Gimenez, V., et al. (2020). Performance of the ATLAS muon triggers in Run 2. J. Instrum., 15(9), P09015–57pp.
Abstract: The performance of the ATLAS muon trigger system is evaluated with proton-proton (pp) and heavy-ion (HI) collision data collected in Run 2 during 2015-2018 at the Large Hadron Collider. It is primarily evaluated using events containing a pair of muons from the decay of Z bosons to cover the intermediate momentum range between 26 GeV and 100 GeV. Overall, the efficiency of the single-muon triggers is about 68% in the barrel region and 85% in the endcap region. The p(T) range for efficiency determination is extended by using muons from decays of J/psi mesons, W bosons, and top quarks. The performance in HI collision data is measured and shows good agreement with the results obtained in pp collisions. The muon trigger shows uniform and stable performance in good agreement with the prediction of a detailed simulation. Dedicated multi-muon triggers with kinematic selections provide the backbone to beauty, quarkonia, and low-mass physics studies. The design, evolution and performance of these triggers are discussed in detail.
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ATLAS Collaboration(Aad, G. et al), Aparisi Pozo, J. A., Bailey, A. J., Cabrera Urban, S., Castillo, F. L., Castillo Gimenez, V., et al. (2020). Operation of the ATLAS trigger system in Run 2. J. Instrum., 15(10), P10004–59pp.
Abstract: The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider employs a two-level trigger system to record data at an average rate of 1 kHz from physics collisions, starting from an initial bunch crossing rate of 40 MHz. During the LHC Run 2 (2015-2018), the ATLAS trigger system operated successfully with excellent performance and flexibility by adapting to the various run conditions encountered and has been vital for the ATLAS Run-2 physics programme For proton-proton running, approximately 1500 individual event selections were included in a trigger menu which specified the physics signatures and selection algorithms used for the data-taking, and the allocated event rate and bandwidth. The trigger menu must reflect the physics goals for a given data collection period, taking into account the instantaneous luminosity of the LHC and limitations from the ATLAS detector readout, online processing farm, and offline storage. This document discusses the operation of the ATLAS trigger system during the nominal proton-proton data collection in Run 2 with examples of special data-taking runs. Aspects of software validation, evolution of the trigger selection algorithms during Run 2, monitoring of the trigger system and data quality as well as trigger configuration are presented.
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Ahlburg, P. et al, & Marinas, C. (2020). EUDAQ – a data acquisition software framework for common beam telescopes. J. Instrum., 15(1), P01038–30pp.
Abstract: EUDAQ is a generic data acquisition software developed for use in conjunction with common beam telescopes at charged particle beam lines. Providing high-precision reference tracks for performance studies of new sensors, beam telescopes are essential for the research and development towards future detectors for high-energy physics. As beam time is a highly limited resource, EUDAQ has been designed with reliability and ease-of-use in mind. It enables flexible integration of different independent devices under test via their specific data acquisition systems into a top-level framework. EUDAQ controls all components globally, handles the data flow centrally and synchronises and records the data streams. Over the past decade, EUDAQ has been deployed as part of a wide range of successful test beam campaigns and detector development applications.
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Hueso-Gonzalez, F., Casaña Copado, J. V., Fernandez Prieto, A., Gallas Torreira, A., Lemos Cid, E., Ros Garcia, A., et al. (2022). A dead-time-free data acquisition system for prompt gamma-ray measurements during proton therapy treatments. Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res. A, 1033, 166701–9pp.
Abstract: In cancer patients undergoing proton therapy, a very intense secondary radiation is produced during the treatment, which lasts around one minute. About one billion prompt gamma-rays are emitted per second, and their detection with fast scintillation detectors is useful for monitoring a correct beam delivery. To cope with the expected count rate and pile-up, as well as the scarce statistics due to the short treatment duration, we developed an eidetic data acquisition system capable of continuously digitizing the detector signal with a high sampling rate and without any dead time. By streaming the fully unprocessed waveforms to the computer, complex pile-up decomposition algorithms can be applied and optimized offline. We describe the data acquisition architecture and the multiple experimental tests designed to verify the sustained data throughput speed and the absence of dead time. While the system is tailored for the proton therapy environment, the methodology can be deployed in any other field requiring the recording of raw waveforms at high sampling rates with zero dead time.
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Carrio, F., Kim, H. Y., Moreno, P., Reed, R., Sandrock, C., Schettino, V., et al. (2014). Design of an FPGA-based embedded system for the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter front-end electronics test-bench. J. Instrum., 9, C03023–12pp.
Abstract: The portable test-bench for the certification of the ATLAS tile hadronic calorimeter front-end electronics has been redesigned for the present Long Shutdown (LS1) of LHC, improving its portability and expanding its functionalities. This paper presents a new test-bench based on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA that implements an embedded system using a PowerPC 440 microprocessor hard core and custom IP cores. A light Linux version runs on the PowerPC microprocessor and handles the IP cores which implement the different functionalities needed to perform the desired tests such as TTCvi emulation, G-Link decoding, ADC control and data reception.
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