Dortmund 2006 – scientific programme

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T: Teilchenphysik

T 707: Kosmische Strahlung VI

T 707.2: Talk

Friday, March 31, 2006, 14:45–15:00, HG2-HS3

Implementation of a FPGA based 16-point Discrete Fourier Transform (Radix-2 FFT) as UHECR trigger for horizontal air showers in the Pierre Auger Observatory surface detector — •Zbigniew Szadowski and Karl-Heinz Kampert — Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Fachbereich C Physik, 42119 Wuppertal

The extremely rare flux of UHECR requires sophisticated detection techniques. The standard methods are oriented on the average event properties. The method presented here aims to improve the efficiency to capture rare events like neutrino-induced horizontal air showers and potentially un-anticipated event topologies.

Currently available powerful and cost-effective FPGAs provide sufficient resources to implement new more sophisticated triggers. This work describes the implementation of a 16-point Discrete Fourier Transform based on the Radix-2 FFT algorithm into Altera Cyclone FPGA, used in the 3rd generation of the Pierre Auger surface detector trigger. All complex coefficients are calculated online in heavy pipelined routines. The register performance of  200 MHz and relatively low resources occupancy of  2000 logic elements/channel for a 10-bit resolution provide a powerful tool to trigger the events in the frequency domain. The FFT code has been successivelly merged into the code of the 1st surface detector level trigger of the Pierre Auger Observatory and is planned to be tested in real pampa environment.

Gefördert mit Mitteln der BMBF Verbundforschung Astroteilchenphysik.