A multichannel digitizer for the PANDA experiment

Abstract

The PANDA Experiment will be one of the future experiments at the Facility for Antiproton and ion Research (FAIR), at Darmstadt, Germany. In the experiment, a stream of frozen hydrogen pellets will traverse vertically an antiproton beam circulating in the accelerator. Collisions of antiproton projectiles with frozen hydrogen pellets will lead to the generation of new particles, which in turn will be measured in the PANDA detector facility. The aim of this thesis is to develop a readout firmware for an ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) prototype, which will be used in the PANDA detector to gather all the necessary information from the antiproton-proton collisions. The firmware takes out interesting parameters of the pulse produced by the collision like amplitude, integral, pedestal or arrival time. The work will include algorithms for pulse recognition, data buffering, data formatting and readout using a Gigabit Transceiver (GTP). Big efforts have been put to achieve a very efficient utilization of the resources and to minimize the latency.