6533b872fe1ef96bd12d3f39

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Frontend Electronics for high-precision single photo-electron timing

subject

description

The next generation of high-luminosity experiments requires excellent particle identification detectors, which calls for imaging Cherenkov counters with fast electronics to cope with the expected hit rates. A Barrel DIRC will be used in the central region of the Target Spectrometer\ud of the planned PANDA experiment at FAIR. A single photo-electron timing resolution of better\ud than 100 ps RMS is required for the Barrel DIRC to disentangle the complicated patterns created\ud on the image plane. R&D studies have been performed to provide a design based on the TRB3\ud readout using FPGA-TDCs with a typical precision of 10 ps RMS and custom frontend electronics with high-bandwidth pre-amplifiers and fast discriminators. The discriminators also provide\ud time-over-threshold information, thus enabling walk corrections to improve the timing resolution.\ud Two types of frontend electronics cards optimised for reading out 64-channel PHOTONIS Planacon MCP-PMTs were tested: one based on the NINO ASIC and the other, called PADIWA, based\ud on FPGA discriminators. Promising results were obtained in a full characterisation using a fast\ud laser setup and in a test experiment at MAMI, Mainz, with a small scale DIRC prototype.