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In this article we present a method of characterizing scintillating materials by digitization of each individual scintillation pulse followed by digital signal processing. With this technique it is possible to measure the pulse shape and the energy of an absorbed gamma photon on an event-by-event basis. In contrast to time-correlated single photon counting technique, the digital approach provides a faster measurement, an active noise suppression, and enables characterization of scintillation pulses simultaneously in two domains: time and energy. We applied this method to study the pulse shape change of a CsI(Tl) scintillator with energy of gamma excitation. We confirmed previously published results and revealed new details of the phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fully digital, prototype data acquisition system upgrade for the TOFOR neutron time-of-flight neutron spectrometer at the JET experimental fusion reactor in Culham, England, has been constructed. This upgrade, TOFu (Time-of-Flight upgrade), enables digitization of associated time and energy deposition information from the TOFOR scintillator detectors, facilitating discrimination of spectral background due to unrelated neutron events based on kinematic considerations. In this publication, a kinematic background discrimination method is presented using synthetic data and validated with experimental results. It is found that an improvement in signal-to-background ratio of 500% in certain spectral regions is possible with the new DAQ system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: (Main INjector ExpeRiment ) is a new few-GeV neutrino cross-section experiment that began taking data in the FNAL NuMI (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Neutrinos at the Main Injector) beam-line in March of 2010. employs a fine-grained scintillator detector capable of complete kinematic characterization of neutrino interactions. This paper describes the data acquisition system (DAQ) including the readout electronics, software, and computing architecture. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The ATLAS Tile Calorimeter is a sampling detector composed by cells made of iron-scintillator tiles. The calorimeter cell signals are digitized in the front-end electronics and transmitted to the Read-Out Drivers (RODs) at the first level trigger rate. The ROD receives triggered data from up to 9856 channels and provides the energy, phase and quality factor of the signals to the second level trigger. The back-end electronics is divided into four partitions containing eight RODs each. Therefore, a total of 32 RODs are used to process and transmit the data of the TileCal detector. In order to emulate the detector signals in the production and commissioning of ROD modules a board called ROD Injector and Multiplexer Board (RIMBO) was designed. In this paper, the RIMBO main functional blocks, PCB design and the different operation modes are described. It is described the crucial role of the board within the TileCal ROD test-bench in order to emulate the front-end electronics during the validation of ROD boards as well as during the evaluation of the ROD signal reconstruction algorithms. Finally, qualification and performance results for the injection operation mode obtained during the Tile Calorimeter ROD production tests are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: An upgrade electronics design for Plastic Ball detector is described. The Plastic Ball detector was a part of several experiments in the past and its back portion (proposed to be used in Main Injector Particle Production (MIPP)) consists of 340 photomultipliers equipped with a sandwich scintillator. The scintillator sandwich has fast and slow signal component with decay times 10ns and 1μs, respectively. The upgraded MIPP experiment will collect up to 12,000 events during each 4s spill and read them out in ∼50s between spills. The MIPP data acquisition system will employ deadtime-less concept successfully implemented in Muon Electronics of Dzero experiment at Fermilab An 8-channel prototype design of the Plastic Ball Front-End (PBFE) implementing these requirements is discussed. Details of the schematic design, simulation and prototype test results are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A new photon-counting 2D detector and time-of-flight (TOF) data-acquisition (DAQ) electronics were developed as a system for iBIX diffractometer in J-PARC. The detector system is composed of two ceramic ZnS/10B2O3 scintillator sheets, 256×2 wavelength-shifting (WLS) fibers, eight 64 ch multi-anode photomultipliers (PMT), a high-speed 512-channel amplifier and discriminator, and a 512-channel encoder module with FPGA for time and position determination. The scintillator sheets have high detection efficiency, 30% and 45% at 1.8Å for 0.2 and 0.3mm in thickness, respectively. The WLS fibers (0.5-mm square type) are arranged along X and Y directions with gaps of 0.02mm; therefore the size of one pixel is 0.52mm. The PMT have 17% of quantum efficiency for the light from WLS fibers. The detective region (133×133mm2) has more than 66% in the front face of the detector. The amplifier and discriminator module has 300MHz of frequency band, fixed gain (60), and 20–300mV of discriminator level. The encoder module has many coincidence modes including various pattern-matching methods and a centroid-computation method. The pulse-pair resolution is 4–5μs. For the DAQ module, we can use both of histogram and event modes for measurement. The recording rate is 5×105 events/s for the event mode. Maximum number of the time-channel bins is 4096 for the histogram mode. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]