Frankfurt 2014 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 46: Poster

HK 46.72: Poster

Thursday, March 20, 2014, 16:00–18:00, HZ Poster

Hardware upgrade for A2 data acquisition — Michael Ostrick, Wolfgang Gradl, Peter-Bernd Otte, Andreas Neiser, Oliver Steffen, •Martin Wolfes, and Tito Körner for the A2 collaboration — Institut für Kernphysik, Mainz, Deutschland

The A2 Collaboration uses an energy tagged photon beam which is produced via bremsstrahlung off the MAMI electron beam. The detector system consists of Crystal Ball and TAPS and covers almost the whole solid angle. A frozen-spin polarized target allows to perform high precision measurements of polarization observables in meson photo-production.

During the last summer, a major upgrade of the data acquisition system was performed, both on the hardware and the software side. The goal of this upgrade was increased reliability of the system and an improvement in the data rate to disk. By doubling the number of readout CPUs and employing special VME crates with a split backplane, the number of bus accesses per readout cycle and crate was cut by a factor of two, giving almost a factor of two gain in the readout rate.

In the course of the upgrade, we also switched most of the detector control system to using the distributed control system EPICS. For the upgraded control system, some new tools were developed to make full use of the capabilities of this decentralised slow control and monitoring system.

The poster will present some of the major contributions to this project.