Andrea Triossi

The first implementation of the AGATA spectrometer consisting of five triple germanium detector clusters has been installed at Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro, INFN. This setup has two major goals, the first one is to validate the γ-tracking concept and the second is to perform an experimental physics program using the stable beams delivered by the Tandem–PIAVE-ALPI accelerator complex. A large variety of physics topics will be addressed during this campaign, aiming to investigate both neutron and proton-rich nuclei. The setup has been designed to be coupled with the large-acceptance magnetic-spectrometer PRISMA. Therefore, the in-beam prompt γ rays detected with AGATA will be measured in coincidence with the products of multinucleon-transfer and deep-inelastic reactions measured by PRISMA. Moreover, the setup is versatile enough to host ancillary detectors, including the heavy-ion detector DANTE, the γ-ray detector array HELENA, the Cologne plunger for lifetime measurements and the Si-pad telescope TRACE. In this paper the design, characteristics and performance figures of the setup will be described.

The effects of sowing date and nitrogen (N) fertilisation on the dynamics of dry matter (DM) and N accumulation during grain filling and on final grain yield and protein concentration for durum wheat were studied in two field experiments. In addition, the ability of the wheat simulation model SiriusQuality1 to simulate grain yield and protein concentration for durum wheat was evaluated. The model simulated the anthesis date and the grain filling duration with a root mean square error of 1.7 and 2.2 days, respectively. The model simulated reasonably well the changes in the dynamics of leaf, stem and grain DM and N in response to sowing date and N fertilisation. Harvest grain yield and protein concentration were simulated with a root mean square error of 0.045 kg DM m−2 and 1.25%, respectively. The longer vegetative period with autumn sowing compared with winter sowing resulted in higher crop DM and N at anthesis, which was associated with higher final grain yield. Independently of the sowing date or N fertilisation, post-anthesis DM accumulation contributed 70% to final grain yield. Post-anthesis N accumulation contributed between 25% and 40% to final grain N yield depending on the sowing date and N fertilisation. The efficiency of vegetative DM and N remobilisation was not modified by the sowing date or N fertilisation, averaging 21% and 74%, respectively. Sowing date had larger effects on grain DM yield than on grain N yield and grain protein concentration was significantly higher for the late sowing date than for the normal sowing date. N treatments did not affect crop phenology, but N fertilisation allowed the crops accumulating more DM and N during the vegetative period. In addition, high-N crops, because of their larger canopy, accumulated more DM and N during grain filling than low-N crops, resulting in higher grain yield and protein concentration at harvest. Both grain number per unit ground area and grain yield were closely correlated with crop DM and N at anthesis. Single grain DM was not modified by N availability. Averaged across N treatments, single grain DM varied from 44.2 to 57.3 mg DM grain−1. These variations were almost entirely accounted for by the mean daily maximum temperature calculated for the 15 days prior to anthesis, suggesting that the temperature during the period of active cell division in the ovary is a major determinant of the final size of durum wheat grains.

A highly segmented silicon-pad detector prototype has been tested to explore the performance of the digital pulse shape analysis in the discrimination of the particles reaching the silicon detector. For the first time a 200 μm thin silicon detector, grown using an ordinary floating zone technique, has been shown to exhibit a level discrimination thanks to the fine segmentation. Light-charged particles down to few MeV have been separated, including their punch-through. A coaxial HPGe detector in time coincidence has further confirmed the quality of the particle discrimination.

The NEutron Detector Array, NEDA, will form the next generation neutron detection system that has been designed to be operated in conjunction with γ-ray arrays, such as the tracking-array AGATA, to aid nuclear spectroscopy studies. NEDA has been designed to be a versatile device, with high-detection efficiency, excellent neutron-γ discrimination, and high rate capabilities. It will be employed in physics campaigns in order to maximise the scientific output, making use of the different stable and radioactive ion beams available in Europe. The first implementation of the neutron detector array NEDA with AGATA 1π was realised at GANIL. This manuscript reviews the various aspects of NEDA.

A study of the dimensions and performance of a single detector of the future neutron detector array NEDA was performed by means of Monte Carlo simulations, using GEANT4. Two different liquid scintillators were evaluated: the hydrogen based BC501A and the deuterated BC537. The efficiency and the probability that one neutron will trigger a signal in more than one detector were investigated as a function of the detector size. The simulations were validated comparing the results to experimental measurements performed with two existing neutron detectors, with different geometries, based on the liquid scintillator BC501.

The issue of pulse pile-up is frequently encountered in nuclear experiments involving high counting rates, which will distort the pulse shapes and the energy spectra. A digital method of off-line processing of pile-up pulses is presented. The pile-up pulses were firstly identified by detecting the downward-going zero-crossings in the first-order derivative of the original signal, and then the constituent pulses were reconstructed based on comparing the pile-up pulse with four models that are generated by combining pairs of neutron and γ standard pulses together with a controllable time interval. The accuracy of this method in resolving the pile-up events was investigated as a function of the time interval between two pulses constituting a pile-up event. The obtained results show that the method is capable of disentangling two pulses with a time interval among them down to 20 ns, as well as classifying them as neutrons or γ rays. Furthermore, the error of reconstructing pile-up pulses could be kept below 6% when successive peaks were separated by more than 50 ns. By applying the method in a high counting rate of pile-up events measurement of the NEutron Detector Array (NEDA), it was empirically found that this method can reconstruct the pile-up pulses and perform neutron-γ discrimination quite accurately. It can also significantly correct the distorted pulse height spectrum due to pile-up events.

The NEutron Detector Array (NEDA) project aims at the construction of a new high-efficiency compact neutron detector array to be coupled with large $ \gamma$ -ray arrays such as AGATA. The application of NEDA ranges from its use as selective neutron multiplicity filter for fusion-evaporation reaction to a large solid angle neutron tagging device. In the present work, possible configurations for the NEDA coupled with the Neutron Wall for the early implementation with AGATA has been simulated, using Monte Carlo techniques, in order to evaluate their performance figures. The goal of this early NEDA implementation is to improve, with respect to previous instruments, efficiency and capability to select multiplicity for fusion-evaporation reaction channels in which 1, 2 or 3 neutrons are emitted. Each NEDA detector unit has the shape of a regular hexagonal prism with a volume of about 3.23l and it is filled with the EJ301 liquid scintillator, that presents good neutron- $ \gamma$ discrimination properties. The simulations have been performed using a fusion-evaporation event generator that has been validated with a set of experimental data obtained in the 58Ni + 56Fe reaction measured with the Neutron Wall detector array.

A comparative study of the neutron–γ discrimination performance of a liquid scintillator detector BC501A coupled to four different 5 in. photomultiplier tubes (ET9390kb, R11833-100, XP4512 and R4144) was carried out. Both the Charge Comparison method and the Integrated Rise-Time method were implemented digitally to discriminate between neutrons and γ rays emitted by a 252Cf source. In both methods, the neutron–γ discrimination capabilities of the four photomultiplier tubes were quantitatively compared by evaluating their figure-of-merit values at different energy regions between 50 keVee and 1000 keVee. Additionally, the results were further verified qualitatively using time-of-flight to distinguish γ rays and neutrons. The results consistently show that photomultiplier tubes R11833-100 and ET9390kb generally perform best regarding neutron–γ discrimination with only slight differences in figure-of-merit values. This superiority can be explained by their relatively higher photoelectron yield, which indicates that a scintillator detector coupled to a photomultiplier tube with higher photoelectron yield tends to result in better neutron–γ discrimination performance. The results of this work will provide reference for the choice of photomultiplier tubes for future neutron detector arrays like NEDA.

The new-generation spectrometer AGATA, the Advanced GAmma Tracking Array, requires sub-nanosecond clock synchronization among readout and front-end electronics modules that may lie hundred meters apart. We call GTS (Global Trigger and Synchronization System) the infrastructure responsible for precise clock synchronization and for the trigger management of AGATA. It is made of a central trigger processor and nodes, connected in a tree structure by means of optical fibers operated at 2Gb/s. The GTS tree handles the synchronization and the trigger data flow, whereas the trigger processor analyses and eventually validates the trigger primitives centrally. Sub-nanosecond synchronization is achieved by measuring two different types of round-trip times and by automatically correcting for phase-shift differences. For a tree of depth two, the peak-to-peak clock jitter at each leaf is 70 ps; the mean phase difference is 180 ps, while the standard deviation over such phase difference, namely the phase equalization repeatability, is 20 ps. The GTS system has run flawlessly for the two-year long AGATA campaign, held at the INFN Legnaro National Laboratories, Italy, where five triple clusters of the AGATA sub-array were coupled with a variety of ancillary detectors.

A new digital pulse-timing algorithm, to be used with the future neutron detector array NEDA, has been developed and tested. The time resolution of four 5 in. diameter photomultiplier tubes (XP4512, R4144, R11833-100, and ET9390-kb), coupled to a cylindrical 5 in. by 5 in. BC501A liquid scintillator detector was measured by employing digital sampling electronics and a constant fraction discriminator (CFD) algorithm. The zero crossing of the CFD algorithm was obtained with a cubic spline interpolation, which was continuous up to the second derivative. The performance of the algorithm was studied at sampling rates of 500 MS/s and 200 MS/s. The time resolution obtained with the digital electronics was compared to the values acquired with a standard analog CFD. The result of this comparison shows that the time resolution from the analog and the digital measurements at 500 MS/s and at 200 MS/s are within 15% for all the tested photomultiplier tubes.

Abstract The Level-1 trigger scouting system of the CMS experiment aims at intercepting the intermediate data produced by the L1 trigger processors before the final trigger decision. This system can be complemented by adding the raw stream of data collected from the detector front-end, whenever the throughput is manageable. In this work, the triggerless readout of the CMS Drift Tubes (DT) detector is presented. This is realized by reading a sector of the DT which has been equipped with the preproduction of Phase-2 upgrade front-end boards. A Xilinx VCU118 acts as a concentrator of the Phase-2 demonstrator lpGBT links and transmits data to a server via 100G TCP/IP. First results coming from a test-stand mimicking the sector demonstrator are shown.

Abstract Several physics experiments are moving towards new acquisition models. In this work some ideas to implement Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) directly on the front-end electronics have been explored, part of the computing farm's CPU resources could be freed. New simulation techniques are introduced to understand RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) firmware block developed at ETH Zürich, including real-time firmware simulation leveraging SystemVerilog's useful features. The ability to explore a wider and dynamic inputs increases the likelihood of uncovering potential issues, identifying edge cases, and validating the system's performance across a broader range of scenarios.

This work describes an online processing pipeline designed to identify anomalies in a continuous stream of data collected without external triggers from a particle detector. The processing pipeline begins with a local reconstruction algorithm, employing neural networks on an FPGA as its first stage. Subsequent data preparation and anomaly detection stages are accelerated using GPGPUs. As a practical demonstration of anomaly detection, we have developed a data quality monitoring application using a cosmic muon detector. Its primary objective is to detect deviations from the expected operational conditions of the detector. This serves as a proof-of-concept for a system that can be adapted for use in large particle physics experiments, enabling anomaly detection on datasets with reduced bias.

In this work we present a comparison between the two liquid scintillators BC-501A and BC-537 in terms of their performance regarding the pulse-shape discrimination between neutrons and γ rays. Special emphasis is put on the application of artificial neural networks. The results show a systematically higher γ-ray rejection ratio for BC-501A compared to BC-537 applying the commonly used charge comparison method. Using the artificial neural network approach the discrimination quality was improved to more than 95% rejection efficiency of γ rays over the energy range 150 to 1000 keV for both BC-501A and BC-537. However, due to the larger light output of BC-501A compared to BC-537, neutrons could be identified in BC-501A using artificial neural networks down to a recoil proton energy of 800 keV compared to a recoil deuteron energy of 1200 keV for BC-537. We conclude that using artificial neural networks it is possible to obtain the same γ-ray rejection quality from both BC-501A and BC-537 for neutrons above a low-energy threshold. This threshold is, however, lower for BC-501A, which is important for nuclear structure spectroscopy experiments of rare reaction channels where low-energy interactions dominates.

Liquified noble gases are widely used as a target in direct Dark Matter searches. Signals from scintillation in the liquid, following energy deposition from the recoil nuclei scattered by Dark Matter particles (e.g. WIMPs), should be recorded down to very low energies by photosensors suitably designed to operate at cryogenic temperatures. Liquid Argon based detectors for Dark Matter searches currently implement photo multiplier tubes for signal read-out. In the last few years PMTs with photocathodes operating down to liquid Argon temperatures (87 K) have been specially developed with increasing Quantum Efficiency characteristics. The most recent of these, Hamamatsu Photonics Mod. R11065 with peak QE up to about 35%, has been extensively tested within the R&D program of the WArP Collaboration. During these testes the Hamamatsu PMTs showed superb performance and allowed obtaining a light yield around 7 phel/keVee in a Liquid Argon detector with a photocathodic coverage in the 12% range, sufficient for detection of events down to few keVee of energy deposition. This shows that this new type of PMT is suited for experimental applications, in particular for new direct Dark Matter searches with LAr-based experiments.

The new TRacking Array for light Charged particle Ejectiles (TRACE) detector system requires monitorization and sampling of all pulses in a large number of channels with very strict space and power consumption restrictions for the front-end electronics and cabling. Its readout system is to be based on analog memory ASICs with 64 channels each that sample a 1μs window of the waveform of any valid pulses at 200 MHz while discarding any other signals and are read out at 50 MHz with external ADC digitization. For this purpose, a new, compact analog memory architecture is described that allows pulse capture with zero dead time in any channel while vastly reducing the total number of storage cells, particularly for large amounts of input channels. This is accomplished by partitioning the typical Switched Capacitor Array structure into two pipelined, asymmetric stages and introducing FIFO queue-like control circuitry for captured data, achieving total independence between the capture and readout operations.

AGATA is a 4-pi array of high purity Ge detectors for in-beam gamma-ray spectroscopy based on the novel concepts of pulse shape analysis (PSA) and gamma-ray tracking. Tracking and PSA require the concurrent digitization-at a sampling rate of 100 Msamples/s-of preamplifier signals of the 36-fold segmented Ge crystals composing the array. Locally digitized data are optically transferred to remote pre-processing nodes for pulse energy computation. The design of the front-end readout and level-1 (L1) trigger in AGATA follows a synchronous pipeline model: the detector data are stored in pipeline buffers at the global AGATA frequency, waiting the global L1 decision. A global timing system provides a reference clock and time tag to the digitizers and the pre-processing units by means of a tree of optically connected timing units. Pre-processing nodes are integrated in advanced TCA-based carrier cards with full mesh connectivity in the backplane and read-out through pci-express based optical links. The front-end data readout and its integration in the global trigger and synchronization system will be described.

The muon collider represents one of the most promising solutions for a future machine exploring the high energy frontier, but several challenges due to the 2.2 $\mu$sec muon lifetime at rest have to be carefully considered. The LEMMA project is investigating the possibility of producing low emittance muon/antimuon pairs from the e$^+$e$^-$ annihilation process at threshold energy, resulting in small transverse emittance beams without any additional beam cooling. However most of the measurements available are performed at higher $\sqrt{s}$ values. It is therefore necessary to measure muons production in positron annihilation at threshold energy and compare the experimental results with the predictions in this specific energy regime. Apart from being a topic of physical interest by itself, these near to threshold measurements can have a sizeable impact on the estimation of the ultimate luminosity achievable in a muon collider with the LEMMA injection scheme.

Proton–deuteron identification at energies between 2.5 MeV and 6 MeV has been studied as a function of the detector working bias. Digital pulse shape analysis (DPSA) has been used to perform the separation from the two mono-energetic beams. The technique makes use of the current signal delivered by a 500μm neutron transmutation doped (NTD) silicon detector, which was setup for low-field injection. It is shown that identification of the H isotopes is better when the detector working bias is close to the depletion voltage rather than over-depletion. The presence of high frequency noise diminished the possibility of identification, however, the use of a simple triangular smoothing algorithm counteracted this.

This paper investigates the compilation of a committed-choice rule-based language, Constraint Handling Rules (CHR), to specialized hardware circuits. The developed hardware is able to turn the intrinsic concurrency of the language into parallelism. Rules are applied by a custom executor that handles constraints according to the best degree of parallelism the implemented CHR specification can offer. Our framework deploys the target digital circuits through the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology, by first compiling the CHR code fragment into a low level hardware description language. We also discuss the realization of a hybrid CHR interpreter, consisting of a software component running on a general purpose processor, coupled with a hardware accelerator. The latter unburdens the processor by executing in parallel the most computational intensive CHR rules directly compiled in hardware. Finally the performance of a prototype system is evaluated by time efficiency measures.

This paper presents the final design and results of the FADC Mezzanine for the EXOGAM (EXOtic GAMma array spectrometer) and NEDA (Neutron Detector Array) detectors. The measurements performed include those of studying the effective number of bits, the energy resolution using HP-Ge detectors, as well as timing histograms and n/γ discrimination performance. Finally, the conclusion shows how a common digitizing device has been integrated in the experimental environment of two very different detectors which combine both low-noise acquisition and fast sampling rates. Not only the integration fulfilled the expected specifications on both systems, but it also showed how a study of synergy between detectors could lead to the reduction of resources and time by applying a common strategy.

Abstract The CMS experiment 40 MHz data scouting project is aimed at intercepting the data produced at the level of the detectors’ front-end without the filters induced by hardware-based triggers. A first implementation is realized by the trigger-less reading and processing of a fraction of the Drift Tube (DT) muon detector, equipped with a preliminary version of the so-called Phase-2 Upgrade on-detector electronics boards. The data are transferred via high-speed optical links to back-end boards independently from the central experiment data acquisition (DAQ), permitting real-time detector status monitoring via receiving all the signals produced at the front-end level, and providing an unbiased estimate of the CMS DT hit-rate under various data-taking conditions.

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a large neutrino detector currently under construction in China. Thanks to the tight requirements on its optical and radio-purity properties, it will be able to perform leading measurements detecting terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos in a wide energy range from tens of keV to hundreds of MeV. A key requirement for the success of the experiment is an unprecedented 3% energy resolution, guaranteed by its large active mass (20 kton) and the use of more than 20,000 20-inch photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs) acquired by high-speed, high-resolution sampling electronics located very close to the PMTs. As the Front-End and Read-Out electronics is expected to continuously run underwater for 30 years, a reliable readout acquisition system capable of handling the timestamped data stream coming from the Large-PMTs and permitting to simultaneously monitor and operate remotely the inaccessible electronics had to be developed. In this contribution, the firmware and hardware implementation of the IPbus based readout protocol will be presented, together with the performances measured on final modules during the mass production of the electronics.

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a multi-purpose, large size, liquid scintillator experiment under construction in China. JUNO will perform leading measurements detecting neutrinos from different sources (reactor, terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos) covering a wide energy range (from 200 keV to several GeV). This paper focuses on the design and development of a test protocol for the 20-inch PMT underwater readout electronics, performed in parallel to the mass production line. In a time period of about ten months, a total number of 6950 electronic boards were tested with an acceptance yield of 99.1%.

The use of earthenware amphorae in winemaking can give wines unique attributes enhancing their typicity. Therefore, in this study, spontaneous and inoculated in-amphora fermentations of Trebbiano Toscano grape must were monitored to assess the Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains occurring in each fermentation as well as the chemical characteristics of the wines. Strain typing via Interdelta analyses pointed out that the commercial starters did not dominate, showing 24% and 13% implantation percentages, and that 20 indigenous strains were present at different percentages, ranging from 2 to 20%, in inoculated and spontaneous fermentations. The assessment of the technical characteristics of the indigenous strains via fermentations at lab and pilot scale (20 L amphorae) and the sensory analysis of the experimental wines allowed for the selection of two indigenous strains to be used as starter cultures in comparison to a commercial strain in 300-L-amphorae vinifications in the cellar. The observed fermentative performances and sensory analysis of the experimental wines highlighted that one indigenous S. cerevisiae strain dominated the process and conferred distinctive sensory characteristics to the Trebbiano Toscano wine, demonstrating its effectiveness in managing the in-amphora fermentations. In addition, the results demonstrated the ability of amphorae to protect the polyphenolic compounds from oxidation during wine ageing. Indeed, the concentration of both hydroxycinnamic acids and flavonols decreased, with an average reduction of 30% and 14%, respectively, while hydroxybenzoic acids remained unchanged.

The increase of luminosity expected by LHC during Phase1 will impose tighter constraints for rate reduction in order to maintain high efficiency in the CMS Level1 trigger system. The TwinMux system is the early layer of the muon barrel region that concentrates the information from different subdetectors: Drift Tubes, Resistive Plate Chambers and Outer Hadron Calorimeter. It arranges the slow optical trigger links from the detector chambers into faster links (10 Gbps) that are sent in multiple copies to the track finders. Results from collision runs, that confirm the satisfactory operation of the trigger system up to the output of the barrel track finder, will be shown.

This work describes new electronics for the EXOGAM2 (HP-Ge detector array) and NEDA (BC501A-based neutron detector array). A new digitizing card with high resolution has been designed for gamma-ray and neutron spectroscopy experiments. The higher bandwidth requirement of the NEDA signals, together with the necessity for accuracy, require a high sampling rate in order to preserve the shape for real-time Pulse Shape Analysis (PSA).

In this work, the development and characterization of a multiple synchronous registers interface communicating with a high-speed serial link and using the Aurora protocol is presented. A detailed description of the developing process and the characterization methods and hardware test benches are also included. This interface will implement the slow control buses of the digitizer cards for the second generation of electronics for the Advanced GAmma Tracking Array (AGATA).

This paper presents the design of the NEDA (Neutron Detector Array) electronics, a first attempt to involve the use of digital electronics in large neutron detector arrays. Starting from the front-end modules attached to the PMTs (PhotoMultiplier Tubes) and ending up with the data processing workstations, a comprehensive electronic system capable of dealing with the acquisition and pre-processing of the neutron array is detailed. Among the electronic modules required, we emphasize the front-end analog processing, the digitalization, digital pre-processing and communications firmware, as well as the integration of the GTS (Global Trigger and Synchronization) system, already used successfully in AGATA (Advanced Gamma Tracking Array). The NEDA array will be available for measurements in 2016.

The online reconstruction of muon tracks in High Energy Physics experiments is a highly demanding task, typically performed on reconfigurable digital circuits, such as FPGAs. Complex analytical algorithms are executed in a quasi-real-time environment to identify, select, and reconstruct local tracks in often noise-rich environments. A novel approach to the generation of local triggers based on a hybrid combination of Artificial Neural Networks and analytical methods is proposed, targeting the muon reconstruction for drift tube detectors. The proposed algorithm exploits Neural Networks to solve otherwise computationally expensive analytical tasks for the unique identification of coherent signals and the removal of geometrical ambiguities. The proposed approach is deployed on state-of-the-art FPGA and its performances are evaluated on simulation and on data collected from cosmic rays.

We present here the design and performance of the On-Board electronics for Drift Tubes board (OBDT), which is the new prototype built to substitute the Drift Tubes (DT) muon on-detector electronics at Compact Muon Solenoid experiment (CMS). The OBDT is responsible of the time digitization of the DT signals, allowing further tracking and triggering of the barrel muons. It is also in charge of the slow control tasks of the DT chamber systems. A prototype of this board has been produced and is being tested both in the laboratory and also in test stands with real DT chambers. The full functionality in real conditions is being evaluated, showing very satisfactory results.

In this work, the features and development process of the novel control card for the digitizers of AGATA are presented. The board is part of the new hardware proposed for the electronic system of the experiment. In particular, the control card provides the sampling clock for the digitizers, contributes to the synchronization of the digital data and performs the slow control of its associated digitizer cards.

In this paper we want to demonstrate that an optical physical medium is compatible with the second generation of PCI Express. The benefit introduced by the optical decoupling of a PCI Express endpoint is twofold: it allows for a geographical detachment of the device and it remains compliant with the usual PCI accesses to the legacy I/O and memory spaces. We propose two boards that can bridge the PCI Express protocol over optical fiber. The first is a simple optical translator while the second is a more robust switch developed for connecting up to four devices to a single host. Such adapters are already working in the control and data acquisition system of a particle detector at CERN and hence they had been qualified for radiation hardness. The positive outcomes of the radiation tests of four types of off-the-shelf transceivers are finally reported.

The vast majority of high energy physics experiments rely on data acquisition and hardware-based trigger systems performing a number of stringent selections before storing data for offline analysis. The online reconstruction and selection performed at the trigger level are bound to the synchronous nature of the data acquisition system, resulting in a trade-off between the amount of data collected and the complexity of the online reconstruction performed. Exotic physics processes, such as long-lived and slow-moving particles, are rarely targeted by online triggers as they require complex and nonstandard online reconstruction, usually incompatible with the time constraints of most data acquisition systems. The online trigger selection can thus impact as one of the main limiting factors to the experimental reach for exotic signatures. Alternative data acquisition solutions based on the continuous and asynchronous processing of the stream of data from the detectors are therefore foreseeable as a way to extend the experimental physics reach. Trigger-less data readout systems, paired with efficient streaming data processing solutions, can provide a viable alternative. In this document, an end-to-end implementation of a fully trigger-less data acquisition and online data processing system is discussed. An easily scalable and deployable implementation of such an architecture is proposed, based on open-source distributed computing frameworks capable of performing asynchronous online processing of streaming data. The proposed schema can be suitable for deployment as a fully integrated data acquisition system for small-scale experimental apparatus, or to complement the trigger-based data acquisition systems of larger experiments. A muon telescope setup consisting of a set of gaseous detectors is used as the experimental development testbed in this work, and a fully integrated online processing pipeline deployed on cloud computing resources is implemented and described.

This board will be part of the upgrade for the new electronics for the EXOGAM2 (HP-Ge detector array) and NEDA (BC501A-based neutron detector array), therefore it was necessary to deal with the problem of providing a sampling card with high resolution for new gamma spectroscopy experiments while sampling at very high rates, with a broad bandwidth in order to preserve the shape for further analysis. Pulse shape analysis is of paramount importance in neutron detectors, such as NEDA, based on scintillators that are sensitive to ?-rays as well. High resolution and high speed are often two parameters which conform a trade-off and it is hard to achieve both simultaneously. The aforementioned constraints and the urge of building new sampling electronics to improve the signal analysis in nuclear physics experiments, led to the development of this FADC mezzanine This involves sampling rates up to 250 Msps preserving a high resolution of 11.3 effective bits in order to satisfy the experiment demands. In this work is described the design and the test bench proposed for a proper high speed ADC characterization system and the results obtained up to now.

A major evolution moved into the I/O architecture of modern computers, where the multi-drop buses have been replaced by a network of point-to-point links. Besides the increased throughput and the inherent parallelization of the data flows, the serial nature of those links and the packet-based protocols allow an easy geographical decoupling of a peripheral device. In the context of the LINCO project, we investigated the possibility of using an optical physical layer for the PCI Express, and we built a bus adapter which can bridge, through such a link, remote buses (>100 m) to a single-host computer without even the need of a specialized driver, given the legacy PCI compatibility of the PCI Express hardware. By the choice of suitable components and dedicated control logic, the adapter has been made tolerant to harsh environmental conditions, like strong magnetic fields or radiation fluxes, that the data acquisition needs of high-energy physics experiments often require.

In order to cope with up to two times the nominal LHC luminosity, the second level of the readout system of the CMS Drift Tubes (DT) electronics needs to be redesigned to minimize event processing time and remove present bottlenecks. The μ ROS boards are μ TCA modules, which include a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA and are equipped with up to 6 12-channel optical receivers of the 240 Mbps input links. Each board collects the information from up to 72 input links (3 DT sectors), requiring a total of 25 boards. The design of the system and the first validation tests will be described.

On

In this thesis we want to investigate the compiling of the well-established language Constraint Handling Rule (CHR) to a low level hardware description language (HDL). The benefit introduced by a CHR-based hardware synthesis is twofold: it increases the abstraction level of the common synthesis work-flow and it can give significant speed up to the execution of a CHR program in terms of computational time. We want to propose a method that sets CHR as a starting point for a hardware description. The developed hardware will be able to turn all the intrinsic concurrency of the language into parallelism. The rules application is mainly achieved by a custom executor that handles constraints according to the best degree of parallelism the implemented CHR specification can offer. Afterwards we want to integrate the generated hardware code, deployed in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), within the traditional software execution model of CHR. The result will be a prototype system consisting of a CHR execution engine composed of a general purpose processor coupled with a specialized hardware accelerator. The former will execute a CHR specification while the latter will unburden the processor by executing in parallel the most computational intensive rules. Finally the performance of the proposed system architecture will be validated by time efficiency measures.

In this work, a graphical user interface to communicate with three common serial protocols is presented. With one tool, the user may be able to control several evaluation boards from different manufacturers or evaluate and program integrated circuits of complex board prototypes. It provides a user-friendly interface to communicate with several chips using the USB port. The program has been used for the first stages in the qualification process of electronic boards for the Advanced GAmma Tracking Array (AGATA).

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a multi-purpose, large size, liquid scintillator experiment under construction in China. JUNO will perform leading measurements detecting neutrinos from different sources (reactor, terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos) covering a wide energy range (from 200 keV to several GeV). This paper focuses on the design and development of a test protocol for the 20-inch PMT underwater readout electronics, performed in parallel to the mass production line. In a time period of about ten months, a total number of 6950 electronic boards were tested with an acceptance yield of 99.1%.

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a large neutrino detector currently under construction in China. JUNO aims to determine the neutrino mass ordering and to perform leading measurements detecting terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos over a wide energy range, spanning from 200 keV to several GeV. Given the ambitious physics goals of JUNO, its readout electronics has to meet specific requirements, which motivated the thorough characterization described in this manuscript. The time synchronization among the electronics modules was found to exceed by few ns the theoretical expectation, as a consequence of the non-optimal data taking conditions. However, the system showed an excellent stability over long data taking periods, ensuring that any time offset could be calibrated out at the beginning of the data taking. The maximal deviation from a linear charge response was found to be 1.1% for the high gain ADC and 0.8% for the low gain ADC. In a JUNO-like environment, i.e 40 m underwater, the recorded FPGA temperature complied with the reliability standards of JUNO.

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a large neutrino detector currently under construction in China. Thanks to the tight requirements on its optical and radio-purity properties, it will be able to perform leading measurements detecting terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos in a wide energy range from tens of keV to hundreds of MeV. A key requirement for the success of the experiment is an unprecedented 3% energy resolution, guaranteed by its large active mass (20 ktons) and the use of more than 20,000 20-inch photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs) acquired by high-speed, high-resolution sampling electronics located very close to the PMTs. As the Front-End and Read-Out electronics is expected to continuously run underwater for 30 years, a reliable readout acquisition system capable of handling the timestamped data stream coming from the Large-PMTs and permitting to simultaneously monitor and operate remotely the inaccessible electronics had to be developed. In this contribution, the firmware and hardware implementation of the IPbus based readout protocol will be presented, together with the performances measured on final modules during the mass production of the electronics.

This work describes an online processing pipeline designed to identify anomalies in a continuous stream of data collected without external triggers from a particle detector. The processing pipeline begins with a local reconstruction algorithm, employing neural networks on an FPGA as its first stage. Subsequent data preparation and anomaly detection stages are accelerated using GPGPUs. As a practical demonstration of anomaly detection, we have developed a data quality monitoring application using a cosmic muon detector. Its primary objective is to detect deviations from the expected operational conditions of the detector. This serves as a proof-of-concept for a system that can be adapted for use in large particle physics experiments, enabling anomaly detection on datasets with reduced bias.

Nuclear reactors are a source of electron antineutrinos due to the presence of unstable fission products that undergo $\beta^-$ decay. They will be exploited by the JUNO experiment to determine the neutrino mass ordering and to get very precise measurements of the neutrino oscillation parameters. This requires the reactor antineutrino spectrum to be characterized as precisely as possible both through high resolution measurements, as foreseen by the TAO experiment, and detailed simulation models. In this paper we present a benchmark analysis utilizing Serpent Monte Carlo simulations in comparison with real pressurized water reactor spent fuel data. Our objective is to study the accuracy of fission fraction predictions as a function of different reactor simulation approximations. Then, utilizing the BetaShape software, we construct fissile antineutrino spectra using the summation method, thereby assessing the influence of simulation uncertainties on reactor antineutrino spectrum.

This work introduces an experimental test of the new proposal for a low–emittance muon accelerator (LEMMA). A low–emittance muon beam is obtained from the e$^+$ e$^-$ → μ$^+$ μ$^-$ annihilation process at the threshold energy of 45 GeV eliminating the need for a dedicated muon cooling system. A series of two testbeam campaigns were carried out at CERN to validate this concept. The experimental setup is presented together with first preliminary results from the obtained data.

The design and performance of the upgraded CMS Level-1 Trigger Barrel Muon Track Finder (BMTF) is presented. Monte Carlo simulation data as well as cosmic ray data from a CMS muon detector slice test have been used to study in detail the performance of the new track finder. The design architecture is based on twelve MP7 cards each of which uses a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA and can receive and transmit data at 10 Gbps from 72 input and 72 output fibers. According to the CMS Trigger Upgrade TDR the BMTF receives trigger primitive data which are computed using both RPC and DT data and transmits data from a number of muon candidates to the upgraded Global Muon Trigger. Results from detailed studies of comparisons between the BMTF algorithm results and the results of a C++ emulator are also presented. The new BMTF will be commissioned for data taking in 2016.

The CMS muon trigger will undergo considerable enhancements in preparation for the LHC run-2. In order to improve rate reduction and efficiency the full muon trigger chain will be completely redesigned: the plan is to move from a redundant scheme, where the three sub-detectors (CSC, DT, RPC) have a separate track finder, to three geographical track finders (barrel, endcap and overlap) that combine trigger primitives of each sub-detector. In particular, the Muon Barrel Track Finder (MBTF) will host a new algorithm, that aggregating DT and RPC trigger data, will be able to improve the fake rejection and the muon momentum measurement. This report will focus on the adaptive layer of the MBTF called TwinMux. Its primary role will be to merge, arrange and fan-out the slow optical links from the chambers in faster links (10 Gbps). It will realize a full connectivity matrix between the on-detector electronics and the MBTF allowing for different processing schemes. The TwinMux will be implemented in mTCA form factor compliant with all the CMS standards in terms of clock distribution, slow control and data acquisition. The TwinMux will be centered around a powerful Virtex-7 FPGA able to exchange data on up to 96 optical lanes. The gigabit connectivity on the backplane will guarantee the connection with the central DAQ, allowing the adoption of the TwinMux as a read out board for DT as well.

The CMS muon trigger will undergo considerable enhancements in preparation for the LHC run-2.In order to improve rate reduction and efficiency the full muon trigger chain will be completely redesigned: the plan is to move from a redundant scheme, where the three sub-detectors (CSC, DT, RPC) have a separate track finder, to three geographical track finders (barrel, endcap and overlap) that combine trigger primitives of each sub-detector.In particular, the Muon Barrel Track Finder (MBTF) will host a new algorithm, that aggregating DT and RPC trigger data, will be able to improve the fake rejection and the muon momentum measurement.This report will focus on the adaptive layer of the MBTF called TwinMux.Its primary role will be to merge, arrange and fan-out the slow optical links from the chambers in faster links (10 Gbps).It will realize a full connectivity matrix between the on-detector electronics and the MBTF allowing for different processing schemes.The TwinMux will be implemented in µTCA form factor compliant with all the CMS standards in terms of clock distribution, slow control and data acquisition.The TwinMux will be centered around a powerful Virtex-7 FPGA able to exchange data on up to 96 optical lanes.The gigabit connectivity on the backplane will guarantee the connection with the central DAQ, allowing the adoption of the TwinMux as a read out board for DT as well.

The investigation of the energy frontier in physics requires novel concepts for future colliders. The idea of a muon collider is very appealing since it would allow to study particle collisions at up to tens of TeV energy, while offering a cleaner experimental environment with respect to hadronic colliders. One key element in the muon collider design is the low-emittance muon production. Recently,the Low EMittance Muon Accelerator (LEMMA) collaboration has explored the muon pair production close to its kinematic threshold by annihilating 45 GeV positrons with electrons in a low Z material target. In this configuration, muons are emerging from the target with a naturally low-emittance. In this paper we describe the performance of a system, to study this production mechanism, that consists in several segmented absorbers with alternating active layers composed of fast Cherenkov detectors together with a muon identification technique based on this detector. Passive layers were made of tungsten. We collected data corresponding to muon and electron beams produced at the H2 line in the North Area of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in September 2018.

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a large neutrino detector currently under construction in China. JUNO will be able to study the neutrino mass ordering and to perform leading measurements detecting terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos in a wide energy range, spanning from 200 keV to several GeV. Given the ambitious physics goals of JUNO, the electronic system has to meet specific tight requirements, and a thorough characterization is required. The present paper describes the tests performed on the readout modules to measure their performances.

We propose a high-level hardware description environment which aims at reducing the gap between application design and the well-established hardware description frameworks. Our motivations rise from an explicit demand for design representation languages at a higher abstraction level with respect to the ones currently adopted by hardware system engineering. A candidate solution can be identified in the constraint programming paradigm. In particular our work investigates the possibility of synthesising special-purpose hardware devices starting from the Constraint Handling Rule formalism. Our method can be used to guide the development of a prototype source-to-source compiler capable of producing, from a constraint based expression, compliant Hardware Description Language code. This paper includes a prototype implementation that allows for efficient parallel execution of multi-set constraint rewrite rules.

In this work, the development and characterization of a multiple synchronous registers interface communicating with a high-speed serial link and using the Aurora protocol is presented. A detailed description of the developing process and the characterization methods and hardware test benches are also included. This interface will implement the slow control busses of the digitizer cards for the second generation of electronics for the Advanced GAmma Tracking Array (AGATA).

The CMS muon barrel drift tubes system has been recently fully installed and commissioned in the experiment. The performance and the current status of the detector are briefly presented and discussed.

The Electronics for the Drift Tube Chambers (DT) of CMS will be significantly upgraded during the LHC Long Shutdown 3 (LS3).DTs are responsible for the tracking and triggering of muons in the central region of CMS.As a consequence of the higher L1A rate set by HL-LHC, the new CMS Trigger requirements will exceed the present capabilities of the DT on-detector electronics (so called MiniCrate, MiC).For this reason, having also in mind easier electronics maintainability and chamber aging mitigation arguments, DTs will replace all their MiCs during LS3.The phase-2 on detector electronics for DT will consist of a single type of board called OBDT (On Board electronics for Drift Tubes).A full description of the OBDT will be given along with the status of the prototype production and validation tests on the firmware.

The muon collider represents one of the most promising solutions for a future machine exploring the high energy frontier, but several challenges due to the 2.2 $\mu$sec muon lifetime at rest have to be carefully considered. The LEMMA project is investigating the possibility of producing low emittance muon/antimuon pairs from the e$^+$e$^-$ annihilation process at threshold energy, resulting in small transverse emittance beams without any additional beam cooling. However most of the measurements available are performed at higher $\sqrt{s}$ values. It is therefore necessary to measure muons production in positron annihilation at threshold energy and compare the experimental results with the predictions in this specific energy regime. Apart from being a topic of physical interest by itself, these near to threshold measurements can have a sizeable impact on the estimation of the ultimate luminosity achievable in a muon collider with the LEMMA injection scheme.

The online reconstruction of muon tracks in High Energy Physics experiments is a highly demanding task, typically performed with programmable logic boards, such as FPGAs. Complex analytical algorithms are executed in a quasi-real-time environment to identify, select and reconstruct local tracks in often noise-rich environments. A novel approach to the generation of local triggers based on an hybrid combination of Artificial Neural Networks and analytical methods is proposed, targeting the muon reconstruction for drift tube detectors. The proposed algorithm exploits Neural Networks to solve otherwise computationally expensive analytical tasks for the unique identification of coherent signals and the removal of the geometrical ambiguities. The proposed approach is deployed on state-of-the-art FPGA and its performances are evaluated on simulation and on data collected from cosmic rays.

This paper presents the design of the NEDA front-end electronics, a first attempt to involve the use of digital electronics in large neutron detector arrays. Among the electronic modules taking part, we emphasize on the front-end analog processing, the digitalization, digital pre-processing, communications firmware, as well as the integration of the Global Trigger and Synchronization system. The NEDA array will be available for measurements in 2015.

The most recent development in the field of photomultipliers operating at liquid Argon temperature is the Hamamatsu R11065 with peak QE up to about 35% A set of these photomultipliers has been extensively tested within the R&D program of the WArP Collaboration. During these tests the Hamamatsu PMTs showed extremely good performance and a light yield around 7 phel/keVee has been achieved in a Liquid Argon detector with a photocathodic coverage of 12%. This shows that this new type of PMT is suited for experimental applications, in particular for new direct Dark Matter searches with LAr-based experiments.

To maintain the excellent performance of the LHC during its Run-1 also in Run-2, the Level-1 Trigger of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment underwent a significant upgrade.One part of this upgrade was the re-organisation of the muon trigger path from a subsystem-centric view in which hits in the drift tubes, the cathode strip chambers, and the resistive plate chambers were treated separately in dedicated track-finding systems, to one in which complementary detector systems for a given region (barrel, overlap, and endcap) are merged already at the track-finding level.This also required the development of a new system to sort as well as cancel-out the muon tracks found by each system.An overview will be given of the new track-finder system for the barrel region, the Barrel Muon Track Finder (BMTF) as well as the cancel-out and sorting layer, the upgraded Global Muon Trigger (µGMT).While the BMTF improves on the proven and well-tested algorithms used in the Drift Tube Track Finder during Run-1, the µGMT is an almost complete re-development due to the re-organisation of the underlying systems from complementary track finders to regional track finders.Additionally, the µGMT can calculate a muon isolation using energy information that will be received from the calorimeter trigger in the future.This information is added to the muon objects forwarded to the Global Trigger.Finally, first results of the muon trigger performance including the barrel region are shown.Both the trigger efficiency and the rate reduction show satisfactory performance, with improvements planned for the near future.

AGATA is a 4-pi array of HP-Ge detectors for in-beam gamma-ray spectroscopy based on the novel concepts of pulse shape analysis (PSA) and gamma-ray tracking. Tracking and PSA require the concurrent digitization -at a sampling rate of 100 Msamples/s -of preamplifier signals of the 36-fold segmented Ge crystals composing the array. Locally digitized data are optically transferred to remote pre-processing nodes for pulse energy computation. The design of the front-end readout and level-1 (L1) trigger in AGATA follows a synchronous pipeline model: the detector data are stored in pipeline buffers at the global AGATA frequency, waiting the global L1 decision. A global timing system provides a reference clock and time tag to the digitizers and the pre-processing units by means of a tree of optically connected timing units. Pre-processing nodes are integrated in ATCA-based carrier cards with full mesh connectivity in the backplane and read-out through pci-express based optical links. Front-end data readout and its integration with the global trigger and synchronization system will be described.

A four-layer muon telescope has been built, employing the equipment and electronics developedfor the Top Tracker (TT) detector of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO).It will serve as a demonstrator of the hardware capabilities in terms of detection efficiency, processing power and system reliability. The entire readout, trigger and acquisition systems havebeen conceived and built around versatile modular electronics embedding the latest generation ofsystem on chips. A detailed description of the telescope will be given along with the status of the TT electronics and their preliminary validation tests.

The CMS Drift Tubes readout system has been upgraded during the 2017-2018 technical stop to a new MicroTCA-based system to deliver the performance required by the increase of LHC luminosity. It comprises 3 µTCA crates with up to 25 boards, each processing 3 sectors from each CMS wheel. The µROS board is built around a Virtex-7 FPGA, and is able to receive 72 input links. The 240-Mbps inputs are deserialized using oversampling and adaptative phase detection. Event building, synchronization, data integrity monitoring and error correction have been implemented. The uROS system is fully operational, taking collision data satisfactorily.

PCI Express is a new I/O technology for desktop, mobile, server and communications platforms designed to allow increasing levels of computer system performance. The serial nature of its links and the packet based protocols allows an easy geographical decoupling of a peripheral device. We have investigated the possibility of using an optical physical layer for the PCI Express, and we have built a bus adapter which can bridge remote busses (> 100m) to a single host computer without even the need of a specialized driver, given the legacy PCI compatibility of the PCI Express hardware. This adapter has been made tolerant to harsh environmental conditions, like strong magnetic fields or radiation fluxes, as the data acquisition needs of high energy physics experiments often require.

The majority of high energy physics experiments rely on data acquisition and hardware-based trigger systems performing a number of stringent selections before storing data for offline analysis. The online reconstruction and selection performed at the trigger level are bound to the synchronous nature of the data acquisition system, resulting in a trade-off between the amount of data collected and the complexity of the online reconstruction performed. Exotic physics processes, such as long-lived and slow-moving particles, are rarely targeted by online triggers as they require complex and nonstandard online reconstruction, usually incompatible with the time constraints of most data acquisition systems. The online trigger selection can thus impact as one of the main limiting factors to the experimental reach for exotic signatures. Alternative data acquisition solutions based on the continuous and asynchronous processing of the stream of data from the detectors are therefore foreseeable. Trigger-less data readout systems, paired with efficient streaming data processing solutions, can provide a viable alternative. In this document, an end-to-end implementation of a fully trigger-less data acquisition and online processing system is discussed. An easily scalable and deployable implementation of such an architecture is proposed, based on open-source distributed computing frameworks capable of performing asynchronous online processing of streaming data. The proposed schema can be suitable for deployment as a fully integrated system for small-scale experimental apparatus, or to complement the trigger-based data acquisition systems of larger experiments. A muon telescope setup consisting of a set of gaseous detectors is used as the experimental development testbed in this work, and a fully integrated online processing pipeline deployed on cloud computing resources is implemented and described.