Title :
The NA60 experiment readout architecture
Author :
Floris, Michele ; Marras, Davide ; Usai, Gianluca ; David, André ; Rosinsky, Peter ; Ohnishi, Hiroaki
Author_Institution :
Univ. degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy
fDate :
6/1/2004 12:00:00 AM
Abstract :
The NA60 experiment was designed to identify signatures of a new state of matter, the Quark Gluon Plasma, in heavy-ion collisions at the CERN Super Proton Synchroton. The apparatus is composed of four main detectors: a muon spectrometer (MS), a zero degree calorimeter (ZDC), a silicon vertex telescope (VT), and a silicon microstrip beam tracker (BT). The readout of the whole experiment is based on a PCI architecture. The basic unit is a general purpose PCI card, interfaced to the different subdetectors via custom mezzanine cards. This allowed us to successfully implement several completely different readout protocols (from the VME like protocol of the MS to the custom protocol of the pixel telescope). The system was fully tested with proton and ion beams, and several million events were collected in 2002 and 2003. This paper presents the readout architecture of NA60, with particular emphasis on the PCI layer common to all the subdetectors.
Keywords :
data acquisition; heavy ion-nucleus reactions; high energy physics instrumentation computing; ion beams; muon detection; proton accelerators; proton beams; quark-gluon plasma; readout electronics; silicon radiation detectors; synchrotrons; CERN Super Proton Synchrotron; NA60 experiment readout architecture; PCI layer; VME like protocol; custom mezzanine cards; custom protocol; data acquisition; general purpose PCI card; heavy-ion collisions; ion beams; matter; muon spectrometer; pixel telescope; proton beams; quark gluon plasma; readout protocols; silicon microstrip beam tracker; silicon vertex telescope; zero degree calorimeter; Ion beams; Mesons; Microstrip; Plasmas; Protocols; Protons; Silicon; Spectroscopy; System testing; Telescopes; Data acquisition; PCI architecture; heavy ion physics; readout electronics;
Journal_Title :
Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TNS.2004.828828