Frankfurt 2014 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 6: Instrumentierung

HK 6.3: Talk

Monday, March 17, 2014, 14:30–14:45, HZ 8

Upgrade of the Data Acquisition System for the A2 Experiment at MAMI — •Andreas Neiser and Wolfgang Gradl for the TRB3 collaboration — Institut für Kernphysik, Johann-Joachim-Becher-Weg 45, Mainz

The A2 collaboration at the electron accelarator MAMI in Mainz uses energy-tagged photons to produce light mesons off the nucleon. Its current data acquisition system is the major performance bottleneck under typical trigger conditions. Furthermore, the availability of spare parts is limited, which renders the maintainability for the next decade difficult. Thus, an upgraded system is desirable for A2 to achieve the upcoming experimental goals. For this upgrade, an FPGA-based solution using the TRB3 is being considered.

The TRB3 is a multi-purpose 4+1 FPGA board and implements a 4×65+4=264 channel time-to-digital converter (TDC) with 11 ps RMS precision between two channels. It was developed at GSI in Darmstadt including different front-ends for signal discrimination and charge measurements. For the precursor TRB2, a charge-to-digital precision of 0.2 % was shown. Owing to its flexible design, it is an attractive upgrade option for A2.

We present the successful integration of the TRB3 into the existing A2 data acquisition system at the trigger and the data read-out interface. First test measurements at our 4π NaI calorimeter Crystal Ball with up to 16 channels yielded promising results. The performance of the TRB3 platform seems to be sufficient for the future requirements of A2. An outlook on upscaling and deploying the system is given.