Speaker
Description
The use of large size detectors and the search of a better topological and energy resolutions implies an increasing data rate. Consequently, information reduction strategies are a need that cannot be overlooked. However, it is important to avoid deadtime in the acquisition process. Most of the light sensors used in time projection chambers (TPC), such as NEXT experiment, are silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) which introduce dark count events. In time window integrator systems, a common challenge occurs when these dark count rates are similar to the actual signal rate. Using an amplitude threshold, under previous conditions, a large part of the true information could be lost. Alternative solutions require single photoelectron (PE) recognition, thus a pile-up reduction mechanism is needed.
A statistical estimator is presented to overcome previous issues. A fully-analog implementation has been designed, which avoids acquisition deadtime. A fast shaper module is used to reduce pile-up effects. Then, a photon counting module works as a PE threshold, computing time over threshold (TOT) of the photon signal, which is proportional to the number of photons. Simultaneously, a mean PE arrival time measurement is computed using N last PE. With both modules, a count of the PE inside a time window is computed while some of the discarded windows that could contain true signal are recovered using Mean Arrival Time Module. This is feasible since last module works across time window boundaries. The whole system allows to take a real time decision without storing further information, thus reducing output data rate.
| Minioral | Yes |
|---|---|
| IEEE Member | No |
| Are you a student? | Yes |