The experimental set-up of the RIB in-flight facility EXOTIC Pierroutsakou, D.; Boiano, A.; Boiano, C. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
10/2016, Letnik:
834
Journal Article
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We describe the experimental set-up of the Radioactive Ion Beam (RIB) in-flight facility EXOTIC consisting of: (a) two position-sensitive Parallel Plate Avalanche Counters (PPACs), dedicated to the ...event-by-event tracking of the produced RIBs and to time of flight measurements and (b) the new high-granularity compact telescope array EXPADES (EXotic PArticle DEtection System), designed for nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics experiments employing low-energy light RIBs. EXPADES consists of eight ΔE–Eres telescopes arranged in a cylindrical configuration around the target. Each telescope is made up of two Double Sided Silicon Strip Detectors (DSSSDs) with a thickness of 40/60μm and 300μm for the ΔE and Eres layer, respectively. Additionally, eight ionization chambers were constructed to be used as an alternative ΔE stage or, in conjunction with the entire DSSSD array, to build up more complex triple telescopes. New low-noise multi-channel charge-sensitive preamplifiers and spectroscopy amplifiers, associated with constant fraction discriminators, peak-and-hold and Time to Amplitude Converter circuits were developed for the electronic readout of the ΔE stage. Application Specific Integrated Circuit-based electronics was employed for the treatment of the Eres signals. An 8-channel, 12-bit multi-sampling 50MHz Analog to Digital Converter, a Trigger Supervisor Board for handling the trigger signals of the whole experimental set-up and an ad hoc data acquisition system were also developed. The performance of the PPACs, EXPADES and of the associated electronics was obtained offline with standard α calibration sources and in-beam by measuring the scattering process for the systems 17O+58Ni and 17O+208Pb at incident energies around their respective Coulomb barriers and, successively, during the first experimental runs with the RIBs of the EXOTIC facility.
•We realized a detection array for Exotic Radioactive Ion Beams.•High granularity (32×32 pixels 2×2mm wide for 8 telescopes).•High solid angle (8 telescopes 64×64mm wide in a cylindrical ...configuration covering up to 2.6sr).•We tested each component of the array by both alpha particles and in-beam environment.•We measured the angular distribution for 17O elastic scattering on a 58Ni target.
The EXPADES (EXotic PArticle DEtection System) detector array consists of 16 Double Side Silicon Strip Detectors (DSSSD) with active areas of 64×64mm2, arranged in 8 ΔE (40/50μm)–E (300μm) telescopes. All detector faces are segmented into 32×2-mm wide strips, ensuring a 2×2mm2 pixel configuration. Eight ionization chambers can be alternatively used as ΔE stages or, if needed, as an additional third layer for more complex triple telescopes. The signals from silicon ΔE layers and from ionization chambers are read by standard electronics, while innovative 32-channel ASIC chips are employed for the readout of the E stages. The results of off-line tests with alpha sources and from the first in-beam experiment with a 17O beam are presented.
The ICARUS T600, a liquid argon time projection chamber (LAr-TPC) detector mainly devoted to neutrino physics, underwent a major overhauling at CERN in 2016–2017, which included also a new design of ...the read-out electronics, in view of its operation in Fermilab on the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) beam from 2019. The new more compact electronics showed capability of handling more efficiently the signals also in the intermediate Induction-2 wire plane with a significant increase of signal to noise (S/N), allowing for charge measurement also in this view. The new front-end and the analog to digital conversion (ADC) system are presented together with the results of the tests on 50 liters liquid argon TPC performed at CERN with cosmic rays.
Large-area PhotoMultiplier Tubes (PMT) allow to efficiently instrument Liquid Scintillator (LS) neutrino detectors, where large target masses are pivotal to compensate for neutrinos' extremely ...elusive nature. Depending on the detector light yield, several scintillation photons stemming from the same neutrino interaction are likely to hit a single PMT in a few tens/hundreds of nanoseconds, resulting in several photoelectrons (PEs) to pile-up at the PMT anode. In such scenario, the signal generated by each PE is entangled to the others, and an accurate PMT charge reconstruction becomes challenging. This manuscript describes an experimental method able to address the PMT charge reconstruction in the case of large PE pile-up, providing an unbiased charge estimator at the permille level up to 15 detected PEs. The method is based on a signal filtering technique (Wiener filter) which suppresses the noise due to both PMT and readout electronics, and on a Fourier-based deconvolution able to minimize the influence of signal distortions—such as an overshoot. The analysis of simulated PMT waveforms shows that the slope of a linear regression modeling the relation between reconstructed and true charge values improves from 0.769±0.001 (without deconvolution) to 0.989±0.001 (with deconvolution), where unitary slope implies perfect reconstruction. A C++ implementation of the charge reconstruction algorithm is available online at 1.
Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a next generation liquid scintillator neutrino experiment under construction phase in South China. Thanks to the anti-neutrinos produced by the ...nearby nuclear power plants, JUNO will be able to study the neutrino mass hierarchy, one of the open key questions in neutrino physics. One key ingredient for a successful measurement is to use high speed, high resolution sampling electronics located very close to the detector signal. Linearity in the response of the electronics is another important ingredient for the success of the experiment. During the initial design phase of the electronics, a custom design with the Front-End and Read-Out electronics located very close to the detector analog signal has been developed and successfully tested. The present paper describes the electronics structure and the first tests performed on the prototypes. The electronics prototypes have been tested and they show good linearity response, with a maximum deviation of 1.3% over the full dynamic range (1-1000 p.e.), fulfilling the JUNO experiment requirements.
This paper describes the design, construction principles and operations of the distillation and stripping pilot plants tested at the Daya Bay Neutrino Laboratory, with the perspective to adapt these ...processes, system cleanliness and leak-tightness standards to the final full scale plants to be used for the purification of the liquid scintillator of the JUNO neutrino detector. The main goal of these plants is to remove radio impurities from the liquid scintillator while increasing its optical attenuation length. Purification of liquid scintillator will be performed with a system combining alumina oxide, distillation, water extraction and steam (or N2 gas) stripping. Such a combined system will aim at obtaining a total attenuation length greater than 20 m @430 nm, and a bulk radiopurity for 238U and 232Th in the 10−15÷ 10−17 g/g range. The pilot plants commissioning and operation have also provided valuable information on the degree of reliability of their main components, which will be particularly useful for the design of the final full scale purification equipment for the JUNO liquid scintillator. This paper describes two of the five pilot plants since the Alumina Column, fluorescent material mixing and the Water Extraction plants are being developed by the Chinese part of the collaboration.
Clock synchronization procedures are mandatory in most physical experiments where event fragments are readout by spatially dislocated sensors and must be glued together to reconstruct key parameters ...(e.g., energy and interaction vertex) of the process under investigation. These distributed data readout topologies rely on an accurate time information available at the front end, where the raw data are acquired and tagged with a precise timestamp prior to data buffering and central data collecting. This makes the network complexity and latency, between front-end and backend electronics, negligible within upper bounds imposed by the front-end data buffer capability where the raw data are stored waiting for the trigger validation. The proposed research work describes a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) that exploits the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) timing, trigger, and control (TTC) system as a multicast messaging physical and data link layer. The hardware implementation extends the clock synchronization to the nanoseconds range, overcoming the typical accuracy limitations inferred by computers Ethernet-based local area network (LAN). Establishing a reliable communication between master and timing receiver nodes is essential in a message-based synchronization system. In the backend electronics, the serial data streams synchronization with the global clock domain is guaranteed by a hardware-based finite state machine that scans the bit period using a variable delay chain and finds the optimal sampling point. The validity of the proposed timing system has been proven in point-to-point data links as well as in star topology configurations over standard CAT-5e cables. The results achieved together with weaknesses and possible improvements are hereby detailed.
The scattering processes of two mirror projectiles, the well bound 17O (Sn = 4.143 MeV) and the loosely bound radioactive 17F (Sp = 0.600 MeV), on the proton closed shell target 58Ni were measured at ...several energies around the Coulomb barrier. The experimental data were analyzed within the framework of the optical model to extract the reaction cross section and to investigate the role played by direct reaction channels at near-barrier energies. The comparison shows a similar behaviour for the two A = 17 projectiles despite their very different binding energies and suggests a rather small effect of the 17F breakup channel on the reaction dynamics.
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