Development of New Front-End Electronics for Super-Kamiokande

Super-Kamiokande is a ring imaging water Cherenkov detector for astro-particle physics that consists of 50 kton pure water and about 13000 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). We are planning to upgrade all the front-end electronics in next year. By high speed signal processing electronics, we will record all the hits of all the PMTs without any hardware filtering, aiming observations of much fainter signals of the supernova relic neutrinos, lower energy (~3 MeV) solar neutrinos, neutrino burst from nearby galactic supernova, and so on. The energy resolutions of multi-GeV atmospheric neutrino events will also be improved by the electronics. The new front-end electronics is based on a charge to time converter (QTC) and a multi-hit TDC. TCP/IP based readout channel is implemented to handle large amounts of data. We have developed a custom ASIC QTC and evaluated the characteristics of the chip and the prototypical board; high-speed (1 MHz cycle), high sensitivity for single photo-electron signal, good charge (0.1 pC RMS) and timing (0.3 ns RMS) responses, and wide charge dynamic range (2500 pC). In this paper, the design and the performance of the front-end board are discribed.