Cost Effective Electronics for Proportional and Drift Chambers of 'EPECUR' Experiment
EPECUR Collaboration, I. G. Alekseev, V. A. Andreev, P. E. Budkovsky, E. A. Filimonov, V. V. Golubev, V. P. Kanavets, M. M. Kats, L. I. Koroleva, A. I. Kovalev,… 展开作者
EPECUR Collaboration, I. G. Alekseev, V. A. Andreev, P. E. Budkovsky, E. A. Filimonov, V. V. Golubev, V. P. Kanavets, M. M. Kats, L. I. Koroleva, A. I. Kovalev, N. G. Kozlenko, V. S. Kozlov, A. G. Krivshich, V. V. Kulikov, B. V. Morozov, V. M. Nesterov, D. V. Novinsky, V. V. Ryltsov, M. E. Sadler, V. A. Sakharov, D. Soboyede, A. D. Sulimov, V. V. Sumachev, D. N. Svirida, V. Yu. Trautman, E. Walker, S. Watson
'EPECUR' experiment setup is under construction at the beam line 322 of the ITEP proton synchrotron. The experiment requires several large area drift chambers to provide reasonable acceptance and fine pitch proportional chambers for beam particle tracking with total number of electronic channels of about 7000. New compact and cost effective readout system for these gaseous detectors was designed, prototyped and tested in the latest two years based on the modern technologies in analog and digital electronics, as well as in data transfer protocols. Mass production of the proportional chamber electronics is close to the end, while the boards for the drift chambers are manufactured in the amount to equip one 8-plane module. The paper presents the functional description of the whole DAQ system and its main parts together with some of the test results as an illustration of the excellent performance of the system. The appendix contains specific information which may be useful for the system users or code developers.
EPECUR experimental setup is aimed at the search of narrow resonant states by precision measurement of differential and total reaction cross sections of pion-nucleon interaction with 1 MeV pion energy steps. In five years passed from the idea of the experiment till the start of the data taking in April of 2009, a new apparatus was build from scratch at the universal beam line 322 of ITEP proton synchrotron U-10. The setup is essentially a non-magnetic spectrometer with a liquid hydrogen target based on the large aperture drift chambers with hexagonal structure. The unique properties of the bea…
Gas Electron Multiplication technology is finding more and more applications in beam instrumentation and at CERN these detectors have recently been adapted for use in transverse profile measurements at several of our facilities. In the experimental areas of CERN's Antiproton Decelerator, low energy Gas Electron Multipliers successfully replaced all Multwire Proportional Chambers in 2012 and another detector type has now been developed for high energy applications in the experimental areas of the SPS, totaling a potential of more than a hundred profile detectors to be replaced by GEM detectors …
Systematic measurements on the rate capability of thin MWPCs operated in Xenon, Argon and Neon mixtures using CO2 as UV-quencher are presented. A good agreement between data and existing models has been found, allowing us to present the rate capability of MWPCs in a comprehensive way and ultimately connect it with the mobilities of the drifting ions.
A new multiwire proportional chamber (MWPC) was designed and constructed for precision studies of neutron beta decay angular correlations. Its design has several novel features, including the use of low pressure neopentane as the MWPC gas and an entrance window made of thin Mylar sheet reinforced with Kevlar fibers. In the initial off-line performance tests, the gas gain of neopentane and the position resolution were studied.
A set of classical multi-wire proportional chambers were designed and constructed with the main purpose of efficient cosmic muon detection. These detectors are relatively simple to construct, and at the same time are low cost, making them ideal for educational purposes. The detector layers have efficiencies above 99% for minimum ionizing cosmic muons, and their position resolution is about 1 cm, that is, particle trajectories are clearly observable. Visualization of straight tracks is possible using an LED array, with the discriminated and latched signal driving the display. Due to the excepti…
Plastic gas pipes are widely used in experimental setups for gaseous detectors, due to their flexibility and easiness of use. This report describes the characterization studies realized on the use of plastic gas pipes, particularly in relation to the accumulation of impurities in gas systems that they may cause. A laboratory setup has been implemented to evaluate the possible effects caused by plastic pipes, in terms of their specific impact on O2 and H2O accumulation and the consequences on detectors performance. As Single Wire Proportional Chambers are very sensitive to the presence of pollu…
A prototype multiwire proportional chamber (MWPC) was developed to demonstrate the feasibility of constructing a radiopure time projection chamber with MWPC track readout to assay materials for alpha- and beta-emitting surface contaminants for future rare-event-search experiments as well as other scientific fields. The design features and assembly techniques described here are motivated by the position and energy resolution required to reconstruct alpha and beta tracks while efficiently rejecting backgrounds. Results from a test setup using an $^{55}$Fe x-ray source indicate excellent operatio…
The DeeMe experiment to search for muon-to-electron conversions with a sensitivity 10--100 times better than those achieved by previous experiments is in preparation at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex. The magnetic spectrometer used by the DeeMe experiment consists of an electromagnet and four multiwire proportional chambers (MWPCs). The newly developed MWPCs are operated with a high voltage (HV) switching technique and have good burst-hit tolerance. In this article, the final designs of the MWPCs, amplifiers for readout, and HV switching modules are described. Additionally, some…
The MUON Detector (MD) of LHCb is one of the largest instruments of this kind worldwide, and one of the most irradiated. It has performed exceptionally well during the RUN1 and RUN2 of the LHC at an instantaneous luminosity of 4$\times$10$^{32}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$, with tracking inefficiencies at the level of 1$\%$ and 2.6$\%$, respectively. Looking forward for the future LHCb Upgrade 2 (U2) planned in 2031 and aiming in running the detector at increased luminosity by a factor $\sim$50, and at the same time keeping a very high ($\sim$99$\%$) detection efficiency, an option with reuse significan…
Wire chambers are routinely operated as tracking detectors in magnetic spectrometers at high-intensity continuous electron beams. Especially in experiments studying reactions with small cross-sections the reaction yield is limited by the background rate in the chambers. One way to determine the track of a charged particle through a multi-wire proportional chamber (MWPC) is the measurement of the charge distribution induced on its cathodes. In practical applications of this read-out method, the algorithm to relate the measured charge distribution to the avalanche position is an important factor…
The muon detector of LHCb, which comprises 1368 multi-wire-proportional-chambers (MWPC) for a total area of 435 m2, is the largest instrument of its kind exposed to such a high-radiation environment. In nine years of operation, from 2010 until 2018, we did not observe appreciable signs of ageing of the detector in terms of reduced performance. However, during such a long period, many chamber gas gaps suffered from HV trips. Most of the trips were due to Malter-like effects, characterised by the appearance of local self-sustained high currents, presumably originating from impurities induced dur…
A new experiment, called DeeMe, which is designed to search for $μ$-e conversions with a sensitivity of $\mathcal{O}(10^{-14})$, is in preparation at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC). It utilizes a high-quality pulsed proton beam from the Rapid Cycling Synchrotron at J-PARC. The detector for DeeMe must tolerate large pulses of prompt charged particles whose instantaneous hit rate is as large as 70 GHz/mm$^2$ in a time width of 200 ns and detect a single electron that arrives with delayed timing on the order of microseconds. A special wire chamber has been developed with a…
One of the three X-ray detectors of the CAST experiment searching for solar axions is a Time Projection Chamber (TPC) with a multi-wire proportional counter (MWPC) as a readout structure. Its design has been optimized to provide high sensitivity to the detection of the low intensity X-ray signal expected in the CAST experiment. A low hardware threshold of 0.8 keV is safely set during normal data taking periods, and the overall efficiency for the detection of photons coming from conversion of solar axions is 62 %. Shielding has been installed around the detector, lowering the background level t…
A Time Projection Chamber (TPC) is a powerful detector for 3-dimensional tracking and particle identification for ultra-high multiplicity events. It is the central tracking device of many experiments, e.g. the ALICE experiment at CERN. The necessity of a switching electrostatic gate, which prevents ions produced in the amplification region o MWPCs from entering the drift volume, however, restricts its application to trigger rates of the order of 1 kHz. Charge amplification by Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) foils instead of proportional wires offers an intrinsic suppression of the ion backflow, …
Dual phase Xenon Time Projection Chambers (XeTPCs) are being used by several experiments as a promising technique for direct detection of dark matter. We report on the design and performance of a small 3-D sensitive dual phase XeTPC. The position resolution is 2 mm in the center of detector, limited by the hole size of the mesh at the proportional scintillation region. An energy resolution of 1.6%(σ /E) for 662 keV gamma rays is achieved by combining the ionization and scintillation signals at a drift field of 0.5 kV/cm. This represents the best energy resolution achieved among liquid xenon de…
We have implemented a cost-effective design for the readout electronics of both the anode wires and the cathode pads of large area proportional wire chambers for the HERA-B muon system based on the ASD-08 integrated circuit. To control and monitor the large number of readout channels, we have built a distributed control system based on Philips Semiconductors' I2C bus and microcontrollers. To date we have installed about 10800 channels of muon chambers and electronics. The average single channel noise occupancy is less than 10**-5, and the detectors have been operated with target interaction ra…
The ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is dedicated to heavy ion physics to explore the structure of strongly interacting matter. The Time Projection Chamber (TPC) of ALICE is a tracking detector located in the central region of the experiment. It offers excellent tracking capabilities as well as particle identification. After the second long shutdown (LS2) the LHC will run at substantially higher luminosities. To be able to increase the data acquisition rate by a factor of 100, the ALICE TPC experiment has to replace the Multi-Wire Pr…
A large number of high-energy and heavy-ion experiments successfully used Time Projection Chamber (TPC) as central tracker and particle identification detector. However, the performance requirements on TPC for new high-rate particle experiments greatly exceed the abilities of traditional TPC read out by multi-wire proportional chamber (MWPC). Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) detector has great potential to improve TPC performances when used as amplification device. In this paper we present the R&D activity on a new GEM-based TPC detector built as a prototype for the inner part for AMADEUS, a new …
Project GRAND, a proportional wire chamber array, is used to examine the decreased counting rate of ground level muons during the Forbush decrease event of September 11, 2005. Data are presented and compared to that of other cosmic ray monitors. A directional study of the Forbush decrease was undertaken and precursor anisotropies to this geomagnetic storm were studied utilizing GRAND's angular resolution.
A novel hadron calorimeter is being developed for future lepton colliding beam detectors. The calorimeter is optimized for the application of Particle Flow Algorithms (PFAs) to the measurement of hadronic jets and features a very finely segmented readout with 1 x 1 cm2 cells. The active media of the calorimeter are Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) with a digital, i.e. one-bit, readout. To first order the energy of incident particles in this calorimeter is reconstructed as being proportional to the number of pads with a signal over a given threshold. A large-scale prototype calorimeter with appr…
Understanding the ability to measure and discriminate particle events at the lowest possible energy is an essential requirement in developing new experiments to search for weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter. In this paper we detail an assessment of the potential sensitivity below 10 keV in the 1 m^3 DRIFT-II directionally sensitive, low pressure, negative ion time projection chamber (NITPC), based on event-by-event track reconstruction and calorimetry in the multiwire proportional chamber (MWPC) readout. By application of a digital smoothing polynomial it is shown that the …
The purpose of the MIPP experiment is to study the inclusive production of photons, pions, kaons and nucleons in pi, K and p interactions on various targets using beams from the Main Injector at Fermilab. The function of the calorimeters is to measure the production of forward-going neutrons and photons. The electromagnetic calorimeter consist of 10 lead plates interspersed with proportional chambers. It was followed by the hadron calorimeter with 64 steel plates interspersed with scintillator. The data presented were collected with a variety of targets and beam momenta from 5 GeV/c to 120 GeV…
