Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Integration of the APV25 Readout Electronics in Jefferson Lab's CODA Data Acquisition System

Student: Jessie Twigger

School: Florida Institute of Technology

Mentored By: Alexandre Camsonne

Hall A's SuperBigBite spectrometer will use Gaseous Electron Multiplier (GEM) detectors as part of the particle tracking system. Currently characterization and general readout of GEM detectors is done with CERN's Scalable Readout System (SRS). The usual SRS system consists of a combination of hardware and data acquisition (DAQ) software elements. The APV25 analog hybrid chip, Front-End Concentrator (FEC), and Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) form the physical components with the associated software being the ALICE collaboration's Data Acquisition and Test Environment (DATE) and Automatic Monitoring Environment (AMORE). The focus of this project was to implement Jefferson Lab's CEBAF Online Data Acquisition (CODA) software for use with the hardware elements of the SRS system. As a basis of comparison for the results obtained through CODA, characterization of a small test chamber under irradiation from cosmic rays and radioactive sources was performed using the traditional SRS software. CODA was then installed alongside the DATE/AMORE framework and configured to use the existing libraries that govern the operation of the FEC/ADC pair. Once communication with the SRS electronics was established, testing of the detector was repeated. While it was not possible to repeat full characterization of the test detector it was possible to read raw output from the SRS system during irradiation. This result presents an opportunity for future use of the SRS system at Jefferson Lab to examine the quality of new chambers and conduct readout of large experiments within the test halls. These findings show that it is functionally possible for Jefferson Lab to integrate CERN's SRS hardware with future experiments and still preserve the standing CODA framework.