In systems with multiple radiation detectors, time synchronization of the data collected from different detectors is essential to reconstruct multi-detector events such as scattering and coincidences. In cases where the number of detectors exceeds the readout channels in a single data acquisition electronics module, multiple modules have to be synchronized, which is traditionally accomplished by distributing clocks and triggers via dedicated connections. To eliminate this added cabling complexity in the case of a new radioactive gas detection system prototype under development at the French Atomic Energy Commission, we implemented time synchronization between multiple XIA Pixie-Net detector readout modules through the existing Ethernet network, based on the IEEE 1588 precision time protocol. The detector system is dedicated to the measurement of radioactive gases at low activity and consists of eight large silicon pixels and two NaI(Tl) detectors, instrumented with a total of three 4-channel Pixie-Net modules. Detecting NaI(Tl)/silicon coincidences will make it possible to identify each radioisotope present in the sample. To allow these identifications at low activities, the Pixie-Net modules must be synchronized to a precision well below the targeted coincidence window of 500-1000 ns. Being equipped with an Ethernet PHY compatible with IEEE 1588 and synchronous Ethernet that outputs a locally generated but system-wide synchronized clock, the Pixie-Net can operate its analog to digital converters and digital processing circuitry with that clock and match time stamps for captured data across the three modules. Depending on the network configuration and synchronization method, the implementation is capable to achieve timing precisions between 300 ns and 200 ps.
Low radioactive material screening is becoming essential for rare event search experiments, such as neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter searches in underground laboratories. A gaseous time projection chamber (TPC) can be used for such purposes with large active areas and high efficiency. A gaseous TPC with a Micromegas readout plane of approximately 20$\times$20 cm$^2$ is successfully constructed for surface alpha contamination measurements. We have characterized the energy resolution, gain stability, and tracking capability with calibration sources. With the unique track-related ba…
As radiation detector arrays in nuclear physics applications become larger and physically more separated, the time synchronization and trigger distribution between many channels of detector readout electronics become more challenging. Clocks and triggers are traditionally distributed through dedicated cabling, but newer methods such as the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol and White Rabbit allow clock synchronization through the exchange of timing messages over Ethernet. Consequently, we report here the use of White Rabbit in a new detector readout module, the Pixie-Net XL. The White Rabbit co…
The Water Cherenkov Detector Array (WCDA) is one of the key parts in the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). In the WCDA, 3600 Photomultiplier Tubes (PMTs) and the Front End Electronics (FEEs) are scattered within a 90000 m2 area, while a time measurement resolution better than 0.5 ns is required in the readout electronics. To achieve such time measurement precision, high quality clock distribution and synchronization among the 400 FEEs (each FEE for 9 PMTs readout) is required. To simplify the electronics system architecture, data, commands, and clock are transmitted simultan…
Direction sensitivity could provide robust evidence for the direct detection of weakly interacting massive particles constituting dark matter. However, the sensitivity of this method remains low due to the radioactive backgrounds. The purpose of this study is to develop a low-background detector as a two-dimensional imaging device for a gaseous time projection chamber. In direction-sensitive dark matter experiments~(e.g. NEWAGE), $α$-rays emitted from the detector components often create substantial radioactive backgrounds. Based on the study of the background of NEWAGE, a new detector "low-$α…
The FERS-5200 is the new CAEN Front-End Readout System for large detector arrays. It consists in a compact, distributed and easy-deployable solution integrating front-end based on ASICs, A/D conversion, data processing, synchronization and readout. Using the appropriate Front-End the solution perfectly fits a wide range of detectors such as SiPMs, multianode PMTs, GEMs, Silicon Strip detectors, Wire Chambers, Gas Tubes, etc. The first member of the FERS family is the unit A5202, a 64 channel readout card for SiPMs, based on the CITIROC ASIC by Weeroc SaS. The Concentrator board DT5215 can mana…
A new technique for ion identification in Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) has been proposed by measuring the ion track ranges using a low-pressure TPC. As a proof of principle, a low-pressure TPC with charge readout using a THGEM multiplier was developed. The tracks of alpha particles from various radioactive sources were successfully recorded in the TPC. The track ranges were measured with a high accuracy, reaching the 2% resolution level. Using these results and the SRIM code simulation, it is shown that the isobaric boron and beryllium ions can be effectively separated at ten sigma leve…
In experiments searching for rare signals, background events from the detector itself are some of the major factors limiting search sensitivity.Screening for ultra-low radioactive detector materials is becoming ever more essential. We propose to develop a gaseous time projection chamber (TPC) with a Micromegas readout for radio screening. The TPC records three-dimensional trajectories of charged particles emitted from a flat sample placed in the active volume of the detector. The detector can distinguish the origin of an event and identify the particle types with information from trajectories,…
In 2019, the LHCb experiment at CERN will undergo a major upgrade where its detector electronics and the entire readout system will be replaced. The goal is to read-out all events at the full LHC frequency of 40 MHz, reaching a total data rate of ~40 Tb/s. In this context, a new timing, trigger and readout control system has been developed: its main tasks are to distribute centrally the clock, the timing information and to synchronize all elements in the readout system: from the very last Front-End ASIC to the building of events to be stored. The heart of the timing and readout control system …
An integrated readout system for parallel-plate avalanche counter and multi-wire drift chamber at HIAF-HIRIBL
Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院近代物理研究所）；School of Nuclear Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学核科学与技术学院）
We report a demonstration of the scalability of optically transparent xenon in the solid phase for use as a particle detector above a kilogram scale. We employ a liquid nitrogen cooled cryostat combined with a xenon purification and chiller system to measure the scintillation light output and electron drift speed from both the solid and liquid phases of xenon. Scintillation light output from sealed radioactive sources is measured by a set of high quantum efficiency photomultiplier tubes suitable for cryogenic applications. We observed a reduced amount of photons in solid phase compared to that…
The tRopIcal DEep-sea Neutrino Telescope (TRIDENT) is a future large-scale next-generation neutrino telescope. In September 2021, the TRIDENT pathfinder experiment (TRIDENT EXplorer, T-REX for short) completed in-situ measurements of deep-sea water properties in the South China Sea. The T-REX apparatus integrates two independent and complementary systems, a photomultiplier tube (PMT) and a camera system, to measure the optical and radioactive properties of the deep-sea water. One light emitter module and two light receiver modules were deployed, which were synchronized by using White Rabbit (W…
The DUNE neutrino experiment far detector has a fiducial mass of 40 kt. The O(1 M) readout channels are distributed over the 4 x 10kt modules and need to be synchronized to O( 10 ns ) with a reliable, simple, affordable system. For the majority of channels a simple DC-balanced protocol is used, with clock and synchronization information encoded on the same fibre. The remaining channels use "White Rabbit" (IEEE-1588). Small scale tests show a timing jitter of <100 ps. The DUNE timing system has been successfully prototyped at the ProtoDUNE-SP detector at CERN.
The proposed Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) imposes new challenges for the vertex detector in terms of high resolution, low material, fast readout and low power. The Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS) technology has been chosen as one of the most promising candidates to satisfy these requirements. A MAPS prototype, called TaichuPix1, based on a data-driven structure, together with a column drain readout architecture, benefiting from the ALPIDE and FE-I3 approaches, has been implemented to achieve fast readout. This paper presents the overall architecture of TaichuPix1, the exper…
CANDLES experiment in Kamioka Underground Observatory aims to obtain the neutrino-less double beta decay ($0νββ$) from $^{48}$Ca. This measurement is a big challenge due to the extremely rare decay rate of $^{48}$Ca. Thus, in order to obtain 0νββ, it is needed to reduce background as much as possible. Series of alpha and beta decays originated from radioactive impurities can remain as background in the energy region of $0νββ$. Because they are sequential decays, we can remove them by tagging preceding and following events. This tagging method requires minimized dead-time of DAQ system. A new D…
High-bandwidth frequency domain multiplexed readout of transition-edge sensors for neutrinoless double beta decay searches
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）
The MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR comprises two arrays of high-purity germanium detectors constructed to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay in 76-Ge and other physics beyond the Standard Model. Its readout electronics were designed to have low electronic noise, and radioactive backgrounds were minimized by using low-mass components and low-radioactivity materials near the detectors. This paper provides a description of all components of the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR readout electronics, spanning the front-end electronics and internal cabling, back-end electronics, digitizer, and power supplies, alo…
The DUNE neutrino experiment far detector has a fiducial mass of 40 kt. The O(1M) readout channels are distributed over the four 10 kt modules and need to be synchronized with respect to each other to a precision of O(10 ns). The entire system needs to be synchronized with respect to GPS time to O(100 ns). The system needs to be reliable, simple and affordable. Clock and synchronization information encoded on the same fibre using a protocol based on duty cycle shift keying (DCSK) with 8b10b encoding to ensure DC-balance. The use of DCSK allows the clock to be recovered directly by PLL based cl…
The Particle And Astrophysical Xenon Experiment III (PandaX-III) is an experiment to search for the Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay (NLDBD) using 200 kg radio-pure high-pressure gaseous xenon TPC with Micromegas detectors at both ends and cathode in the middle. A small-scale TPC equipped with 7 Microbulk Micromegas detectors is developed as the prototype detector. 128 channels are readout following an X-Y design with strips of 3 mm pitch (64 channels each direction) from one Micromegas module. Highly integrated front-end electronics composed of 4 front-end cards with 1024 readout channels is de…
Electron Emission Channeling for lattice location of radioactive isotopes in single crystals: Improvements from a Timepix3 quad detector and new PyFDD data analysis software
The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is one detector of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). TileCal is a sampling calorimeter made of steel plates and plastic scintillators which are readout using approximately 10,000 PhotoMultipliers Tubes (PMTs). In 2024, the LHC will undergo a series of upgrades towards a High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) to deliver up to 7.5 times the current nominal instantaneous luminosity. The ATLAS Tile Phase II Upgrade will accommodate detector and Data AcQuisition (DAQ) system to the HL-LHC requirements. The detector electronics will be redesigned using a n…
Electronic systems for qubit control and measurement serve as a bridge between quantum programming language and quantum information processors. With the rapid development of superconducting quantum circuit (SQC) technology, synchronization in a large-scale system, low-latency execution, and low noise are required for electronic systems. Here, we present a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based electronic system with a distributed synchronous clock and trigger architecture. The system supports synchronous control of qubits with jitters of approximately 5 ps. We implement a real-time digital…
A promising technology concept for sub-GeV dark matter detection is described, in which low-temperature microcalorimeters serve as the sensors and superfluid $^4$He serves as the target material. A superfluid helium target has several advantageous properties, including a light nuclear mass for better kinematic matching with light dark matter particles, copious production of scintillation light, extremely good intrinsic radiopurity, a high impedance to external vibration noise, and a unique mechanism for observing phonon-like modes via liberation of $^4$He atoms into a vacuum (`quantum evaporat…
The search for a novel technology able to detect and reconstruct nuclear recoil events in the keV energy range has become more and more important as long as vast regions of high mass WIMP-like Dark Matter candidate have been excluded. Gaseous Time Projection Chambers (TPC) with optical readout are very promising candidate combining the complete event information provided by the TPC technique to the high sensitivity and granularity of last generation scientific light sensors. A TPC with an amplification at the anode obtained with Gas Electron Multipliers (GEM) was tested at the Laboratori Nazio…
The ATLAS Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is the central section of the hadronic calorimeter of the ATLAS experiment at LHC. This sampling calorimeter uses steel plates as absorber and scintillating tiles as active medium. The light produced by the passage of charged particles is transmitted by wavelength shifting fibers to photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs), located in the outer part of the calorimeter. The readout is segmented into about 5000 cells, each one being read out by two PMTs in parallel. To calibrate and monitor the stability and performance of the full readout chain during the data taking, …
We report the design, construction, and initial commissioning results of a large high pressure gaseous Time Projection Chamber (TPC) with Micromegas modules for charge readout. The detector vessel has an inner volume of about 600 L and an active volume of 270 L. At 10 bar operating pressure, the active volume contains about 20 kg of xenon gas and can image charged particle tracks. Drift electrons are collected by the charge readout plane, which accommodates a tessellation of seven Micromegas modules. Each of the Micromegas covers a square of 20 cm by 20 cm. A new type of Microbulk Micromegas i…
The Water Cherenkov Detector Array (WCDA) is one of the major components of the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). In the WCDA, 3600 Photomultiplier Tubes (PMTs) and the Front End Electronics (FEEs) are scattered over a 90000 m2 area, while high precision time measurements (0.5 ns RMS) are required in the readout electronics. To meet this requirement, the clock has to be distributed to the FEEs with high precision. Due to the "triggerless" architecture, high speed data transfer is required based on the TCP/IP protocol. To simplify the readout electronics architecture and be c…
Time-Correlated Single Photon Counting (TCSPC) and time tagging of individual photon detections are powerful tools in many quantum optical experiments and other areas of applied physics. Using TCSPC, e.g., for the purpose of fluorescence lifetime measurements, is often limited in speed due to dead-time losses and pile-up. We show that this limitation can be lifted by reducing the dead-time of the timing electronics to the absolute minimum imposed by the speed of the detector signals while maintaining high temporal resolution. A complementing approach to speedy data acquisition is parallelizati…
The detector readout architecture introduced in this paper is intended for small to medium size physics experiments that have moderate bandwidth needs, and applications that require an ultimately low background radioactivity for the parts close to the detector. The first idea to simplify the readout system and minimize material budget is to use a common fanout structure to transport from the off-detector back-end electronics all the traffic required for the synchronization, configuration and readout of the front-end electronics. The second idea is to use between each front-end card and the bac…
Directional detection of nuclear recoils is broadly desirable in nuclear and particle physics. At low recoil energies, this capability may be used to confirm the cosmological origin of a dark matter signal, to penetrate the so-called neutrino floor, or to distinguish between different neutrino sources. Gas Time Projection Chambers (TPCs) can enable directional recoil detection if the readout granularity is sufficiently high, as is the case when micro-pattern gaseous detectors (MPGDs) are utilized. A key challenge in such detectors is identifying and rejecting background electron recoil events …
We study the possibility to use the Cherenkov light for the efficient detection of 511 keV photons with the goal to use it in TOF-PET. We designed and tested two detection modules consisting of PbF$_2$ crystals attached to Planacon MCP-PMT XP85012. Amplified PMT signals are digitized by the SAMPIC module with high readout rate, up to $10^5$ events/s, and a negligible contribution to the time resolution, below 20 ps (FWHM). We developed a fast 2D scanning system to calibrate the PMT time response and studied in details the timing characteristics of the Planacon PMT. Using a radioactive $^{22}$N…
A new design for the anode of a time projection chamber, consisting of a charge-detecting "tile", is investigated for use in large scale liquid xenon detectors. The tile is produced by depositing 60 orthogonal metal charge-collecting strips, 3~mm wide, on a 10~\si{\cm} $\times$ 10~\si{\cm} fused-silica wafer. These charge tiles may be employed by large detectors, such as the proposed tonne-scale nEXO experiment to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay. Modular by design, an array of tiles can cover a sizable area. The width of each strip is small compared to the size of the tile, so a Fris…
The long slab is a new prototype for the SiW-Ecal, a silicon tungsten electromagnetic calorimeter for the ILD detector of the future International Linear Collider. This new prototype has been designed to demonstrate the ability to build a full length detecting layer (1.60m for the ILD barrel). Indeed, this length induces difficulties for clock and signal propagation and data integrity. The design used for short length slabs had to be adapted on the basis of a simulation study. The long slab performance has been tested with cosmics, radioactive source and with 3 GeV electrons in the beam tests …
Small animal Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is dedicated to small animal imaging, which requires high position and energy precision, as well as good flexibility and efficiency of the electronics. This paper presents the design of a digital signal processing logic for a marmoset brain PET system based on LYSO crystal arrays, SiPMs, and the resistive network readout method. We implement 32-channel signal processing in a single Xilinx Artix-7 Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The logic is designed to support four online modes which are regular data processing mode, flood map construction …
T-DAQ-P: a portable tablet-form multi-stream data acquisition and contextual telemetry platform based on COTS modules and a custom integration layer
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Roma Tre（意大利国家核物理研究所罗马第三分部）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Ferrara（意大利国家核物理研究所费拉拉分部）
Upgrade of the Trigger and Data Acquisition System for Continuous Imaging and Multi-Camera Operation in CYGNO
University of Coimbra（科英布拉大学）；Gran Sasso Science Institute（格兰萨索科学研究所）；INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso（意大利国家核物理研究所格兰萨索国家实验室）；INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati（意大利国家核物理研究所弗拉斯卡蒂国家实验室）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）
