Speaker
Description
ICARUS is a large liquid argon time projection chamber acting as the far detector in the Short Baseline Neutrino program at Fermilab. ICARUS sees a large flux of accelerator neutrinos from both the BNB and NuMI beams operated by Fermilab and also a many cosmogenic muons. Due to the large number of neutrinos and cosmic ray events seen by the detector, ICARUS data storage and processing are a persistent issue. To accommodate the data rates and storage needs of the experiment we have developed a technique to compress the data within the TPC readout boards. The schema lessens the impact on the trigger throughput and preserves the data needed for high-statistics studies while also reducing the footprint of the raw data products by a factor of 5.4 when combined with offline software compression, using a lossless, per-sample difference encoding implemented directly in the CAEN A2795 firmware. This work shows the first time running with hardware compression reducing data readout bandwidth in a surface-level accelerator neutrino experiment. These schemata are of interest for high-density neutrino interactions, such as will be seen at the DUNE near detector site, where we wish to minimize data bandwidth without sacrificing fidelity.