Speakers
Description
We present a high-speed, modular Data Acquisition (DAQ) solution developed for Pitt-CoRTEx (Pitt-Cosmic Ray Tracker Experiment), a compact and scalable muon tracking detector designed for educational and small-scale particle physics applications. The detector consists of 128 extruded plastic scintillator bars, each embedded with a wavelength-shifting (WLS) optical fiber that guides light to Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) upon energy deposition. To support real-time signal readout, a custom front-end DAQ system is developed using the CITIROC-1A ASIC for signal amplification, shaping and charge measurement. Each DAQ module integrates a 32-channel CITIROC ASIC and a Spartan-7 FPGA daughter card, providing local signal processing and scalability. Four such DAQ modules interface with the detector, with one acting as the master and others as slaves, enabling synchronized acquisition across all 128 channels. The master DAQ transmits the 128-bit muon trajectory data to a Raspberry Pi module, which in turn controls 128 LEDs mounted on the front panels of each detector layer, illuminating the corresponding LEDs along both the X and Y axes which provides a visual display of cosmic muon track. The DAQ modules include onboard SiPM biasing, ADCs for charge digitization, and FPGA resources for implementing real-time track fitting and timing measurement. The Pitt-CoRTEx system is portable, low-power, and well-suited for muon flux and angular distribution studies, undergraduate training, and public science outreach. And the DAQ solution proposed here is a plug-and-play architecture that makes it a viable solution for other SiPM-based particle detector applications.
