Eos is a hybrid neutrino detector constructed to demonstrate reconstruction techniques that leverage both Cherenkov and scintillation light. Eos is currently filled with 4-tons of water-based liquid scintillator, and employs 200 fast 8" PMTs (R14688-100) with transit time spreads of 1 ns (FWHM) and risetimes of 2.2 ns, as well as 12 spectral sorting dichroicon PMTs to isolate Cherenkov light....
We present a novel optical communication system that can overcome the limitations of conventional wire-based readout. We have coupled this system to a novel clockless Q-Pix design built using Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components. In Q-Pix, charge is read out using a charge-integrate-replenishment circuit that provides replenishment pulses corresponding to the time when a particular...
Caribou is a versatile data acquisition system used in multiple collaborative frameworks (CERN EP R&D, DRD3, AIDAinnova, Tangerine) for laboratory and test-beam qualification of novel silicon pixel detector prototypes. The system is built around a common hardware, firmware and software stack shared across different projects, thereby drastically reducing the development effort and cost. It...
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a next generation long-baseline neutrino experiment that will study neutrino oscillations using a high-intensity neutrino beam produced by the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility at Fermilab. The beam will pass through two detector complexes: a near detector complex at Fermilab and a far detector complex located ~1.5 km underground at the Sanford...
ALFE2 is an ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter (LAr) front-end ASIC designed for the High Luminosity-Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) upgrade. ALFE2 comprises four channels of Pre-Amplifiers (PAs) and CR-(RC)2 shapers (SH) with adjustable input impedance. Each shaper has a Low Gain (LG) output and a High Gain (HG) output. Both outputs can be simultaneously read out to cover a 16-bit dynamic range...
Over the past few decades, Liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers (LArTPCs) have emerged as a central technology for rare-event detection, due to their calorimetric and imaging capabilities. Adding a magnetic field to LArTPCs would enable charge identification and momentum measurements via curvature. For neutrino experiments, this is crucial for wrong-sign neutrino rejection, electron/positron...
The SiPM-on-Tile technology has been adopted in several calorimeter subsystems of ePIC, including the forward and backward hadronic calorimeters (1.5 < η < 3.0), the high-granularity insert (3.0 < η < 4.0), and the Zero-Degree Calorimeter (ZDC, η > 6.0). To validate the design and assess detector performance, we developed prototypes for both the insert and the ZDC. These prototypes were tested...
We report room-temperature and 77 K characterization and modeling of SkyWater 130 nm (Sky130) NMOS and PMOS transistors. Using a custom closed cycle cryostat we measured the I-V characteristics from multiple Sky130 MOSFETs. These MOSFETs were fabricated on a chip manufactured as a part of the Efabless Open Multi-Project Wafer program using the Sky130 CMOS technology node specifically to...
The RICOCHET experiment measures the spectrum of coherent elastic neutrino-nuclear scattering (CEνNS) of reactor neutrinos to search for physics beyond the Standard Model. In RICOCHET’s Q-Array detector, recoil energy deposited in an array of superconducting crystals is transferred to transition-edge sensors (TES). TESes convert the heat signals into current signals, which then get amplified...
Detectors at future colliders will require timing precision on the order of 10 ps. Towards this goal, we’ve developed a low-power, high-speed prototype ASIC in 28nm CMOS named MetaRock. MetaRock is an evolution of the Pebbles ASIC. As compared to its predecessor, MetaRock includes a prototype low-power TDC based on a time stretching circuit. An on chip test bench consisting of a charge...
In this talk, we will present CHARMS250V1, a cryogenic front-end application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed using a 65 nm process for low-noise readout of charge or light signals produced in noble liquid detectors. The design of CHARMS250V1 has evolved from the LArASIC chip, which was manufactured in a 180 nm process and has been selected as the first component in the 3-ASIC...
The DUNE far detector phase I consists of two 10-kt fiducial mass Liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers (LArTPCs), FD-HD (Horizontal Design) and FD-VD (Vertical Design), providing 20-kt of active volume for high-precision neutrino detection and rare event searches. There are 384,000 electrodes over 150 detector units called Anode Plane Arrays (APAs) in FD-HD, and 245,760 electrodes over 80...
In advanced detectors, we observe events of stored energy releases, as well as energy accumulation and delayed release dynamics. Spontaneous burst emission of electrons, photons, phonons, and quasiparticles produces excess backgrounds in different dark matter detectors. Accumulation of unextracted charges on the liquid-gas interface in large dual-phase detectors can lead to surface...
The calibration of ultra-sensitive THz/meV detectors in cryogenic environments is a significant challenge, as standard fiber optics absorb THz radiation and tunable sources are limited. A system is being developed using a photomixer and hollow circular waveguides to deliver tunable frequency THz photons to cryogenic sensors. This work is motivated by the need to calibrate superconducting...
Future high-energy physics (HEP) and nuclear physics (NP) experiments will depend on increasingly granular, low-mass tracking and vertex detectors to achieve unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. This segmentation trend imposes strict requirements on readout integrated circuits (ROICs): amplification, filtering, amplitude and timing extraction, and higher-level feature analysis must...
We recently started a project to develop a new pathfinding experiment with a new detection concept [1] to explore ultralight axion dark matter in a completely unexplored mass range near 10 neV. Our detection concept is based on a superconducting resonant inductor-capacitor (LC) circuit with an optical quantum sensor (OQS). The target signal we seek to detect is a minute axion-induced magnetic...
After being successfully deployed to readout a subset of the ATLAS subdectors during LHC Run 3 (2022-2026), the FELIX will serve all
ATLAS subdectors in LHC Run 4 (2030-2033). FELIX is a router between custom serial links from front-end ASICs and FPGAs to data collection and processing components via a commodity switched network. FELIX is also responsible for forwarding the LHC clock, fixed...
Fast and efficient processing of data from the tracking detector of the ATLAS experiment is required for the high-luminosity program. The tracking detector is equipped with semiconductor sensors with high-segmentation of about 50 by 50 microns. A charged particle crossing a sensor ionizes a few pixels along its trajectory. Our firmware processes images from the sensors to calculate coordinates...
High-Rate Picosecond Photodetectors (HRPPDs) are micro-channel plate (MCP)-based, DC-coupled photosensors recently developed by Incom, Inc. These sensors offer an active area of 104 mm × 104 mm, a pixel pitch of 3.25 mm, peak quantum efficiency exceeding 30%, low dark count rates, and a timing resolution of approximately 20 ps for single-photon detection. These features make HRPPDs highly...
We present a new cryogenic detector concept that exploits anisotropic phonon focusing in high-purity Ge or Si crystals, combined with high-voltage Luke amplification and phonon spectral filtering, to achieve nuclear recoil (NR) and electronic recoil (ER) discrimination down to ∼1 eV recoil energies. The detector is oriented so that ballistic longitudinal phonons from an event are concentrated...
The tight integration of machine learning (ML) models into detector readout and trigger systems will allow future HEP detectors to move complex reconstruction tasks much closer to the detector compared to the current implementations. This will enable these detectors to cope with much higher data rates and perform more complex and better targeted event selection at trigger level. ML algorithms...
In this talk, we will present our on-going work on the co-design of integrated electro-photonic Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for real-time charged particle tracking, as part of the El-Pho project within the MEERCAT microelectronics science research center (MSRC). GNNs are a natural fit for particle track reconstruction due to their ability to efficiently process the sparse and irregular data...
We report results from a 12-liter liquid argon test stand at Wellesley College. The system includes a single-pass liquid argon purifier, a double-gridded purity monitor to assess the electron lifetime, and a slow control and data acquisition system. This purifier will support ongoing detector R&D on charge and light readout technologies for future large-scale liquid argon time projection...
The nEXO experiment, a next-generation liquid xenon time-projection chamber enriched to 90% $^{136}$Xe, will search for neutrinoless double-beta decay with a projected half-life sensitivity of $1.35 × 10^{28}$ years over a 10-year lifespan. Achieving this sensitivity requires high efficiency vacuum-ultraviolet (VUV) silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) to detect xenon scintillation light at 175...
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven effective for edge classification in particle track reconstruction at the LHC. In this context, our GNN is trained in PyTorch to identify edge candidates—line segments connecting pairs of detector hits originating from ionizing particles. We present an FPGA-based emulator of such a GNN that achieves, to our knowledge, the fastest reported clock speed...
Designing superconducting qubit sensors with high sensitivity to ultra-low energy particles requires engineering chips that realize precise quantum Hamiltonians. Traditionally, creating a chip that realizes a specific Hamiltonian requires a time-consuming, iterative loop of simulations and manual adjustments. In this work, we apply supervised machine learning to dramatically accelerate this...
The Qpix ASIC implements a novel idea for reconstruction of tracks by measuring ionization currents as a time correlated collection of unit charges with a programmable unit charge between ½ and 2fC and a minimum time marking interval of 2X the clock (external or internal). Measurement results of bench tests of a 16 channel ASIC at room temperature and at liquid nitrogen temperature with the...
This project will use on-chip machine learning algorithms to produce intelligent networks. Both conventional digital logic and spike-based neuromorphic implementations will be explored. Two network scales will be prototyped: a multi-chip network, where each element is a complex functionality sensor and many sensors are integrated on a circuit board to form the network (suitable for DUNE or...
Rapid detection of beam losses is essential at large-scale HEP/NP facilities to protect sensitive components from the damaging effects of unstable high-energy beams. To address this for the EIC, we deployed a prototype beam loss monitoring (BLM) system at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), designed to test fast abort capabilities with response times on the order of a single beam...
We present the results of testing the novel optical communication scheme for the Q-Pix charge readout in an Argon purity monitoring system. Q-Pix is a novel charge readout scheme which consists of a charge-integrate-replenishment circuit that provides replenishment pulses corresponding to the time when a particular amount of charge is collected. In our optical communication scheme, the...
