Münster 2002 – scientific programme

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HK: Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 10: Poster Session: Nuclear Physics/Spectroscopy

HK 10.6: Poster

Tuesday, March 12, 2002, 10:30–12:45, Foyer Chemie

Acquisition of Data from Digital Electronics for a Large Ge Array — •N. Warr, J. Eberth, G. Pascovici, and D. Weißhaar — Institut für Kernphysik, Zülpicherstr. 77, D-50937 Köln, Germany

Modern arrays for γ-ray spectroscopy typically have over a 100 channels and require special data acquisition systems. The current trend towards position sensitivity through pulse-shape analysis and eventually to γ-ray tracking imposes the use of digital electronics. We report on the successful implementation of such a system, using commercial digital electronics for Miniball which already has 126 Ge channels.

Each Miniball triple cluster has three 6-fold segmented Ge detectors which yield 7 signals (core and 6 segments). 36 camac-based DGF cards supplied by Xia are used for the six triple clusters of phase I. The data are buffered by the DGF cards and transferred to a PC using a block mode fast camac transfer by one PCI-based camac crate controller for each crate. The camac crates are read out in parallel, so there is little increase in dead time as more crates are added when using a multiprocessor PC.

A complete spectrometer also requires ancillary detectors and although the simplest method is to use the same digital electronics for the ancillary detectors, this may be an expensive option if traditional electronics is already available. To circumvent this problem, we have conceived a method to use a single DGF card together with traditional analogue electronics, where the DGF card provides a timestamp for the analogue data which is read out in the conventional way.

Funded by BMBF under contract no. 060K958.