Applications of Digital Pulse Acquisition Systems and Software Defined Electronics (SDE) in Advanced Teaching Labs

September 24th, 2021| |CAEN Experiments, Cosmic Rays, Gamma Spectroscopy, Nuclear Physics and Radioactivity, Particle Physics, Particle Physics

The CAEN DT5790N is a digital acquisition system which houses two high voltage supplies and two highspeed (12bits, 250MHz) waveform (pulse digitizers. These in tandem with the use of post processing software combine to produce a Software Defined Electronics (SDE) system that can be used in several advanced teaching experiments. FPGAs and built-in software can be used to display the pulse waveform and produce a time-stamped output (4 ns intervals) in a text list for post processing, e.g via MATLAB, Python, LabView, ROOT, BASIC, etc. The SDE can than be reconfigured as neeeded and used to run many nuclear and other expermiments in an advances teaching lab course. This serves to expose students to modern state-of-the-art data acquisition technology. Experiments such as Fission Neutron, Time-of-Flight, Comptron Scattering, Co-60 Gamma Coincidence, Na-22 Gamma-Gamma Annighilation. Muon Lifetime, etc. are well suited for SDE. The SDE system also provides a very adaptive and cost-effective substitute for NIM or CAMAC electronics as SDE can be easily set up with only a single digitizer box and a computer for many different experiments. Typical data using the SDE application we have developed for several advanced teaching lab experiments will be shown. Several other digitizers similar to the CAEN unit are also available for SDE.

High School Students’ Water Cherenkov Detector

September 24th, 2021| |CAEN Experiments, Cosmic Rays, Particle Physics, Particle Physics

During last decade a lot of outreach activities were born to bring Science in the youths’ hearts through the study of elementary particles physics using frontier detectors. The aim of this project, i-SpeChe, is to develop a multipurpose prototype detector for a wide range of experiments from the study of natural radioactivity to cosmic rays flux using a SiPM matrix easily coupled to different scintillators or, to realize a Water Cherenkov Detector, to water tank. All the detectors used for outreach activities must be robust, easy to use and transport, LV based and economic. The choice is usually scintillator+ SiPM and this limits the knowledge of the wide range of existing detectors used in particles and astroparticle physics. Our effort is to realize a Cherenkov detector coupling water to a SiPM matrix. Cherenkov detectors are now found in a wide variety of unique applications throughout physics, astrophysics, and biomedicine, with more powerful, and larger devices continuing to be developed and implemented. Particular examples include the many detectors at particle accelerators for hadronic particle identification, the large water Cherenkov detectors used for neutrino detection both for astrophysics and accelerator studies, and the imaging air Cherenkov telescopes used to study very-high-energy γ rays in cosmic radiation. Most of the experiments based on Cherenkov effect in water use PMT. The use of SiPM coupled with water is still under study and i-SpeChe is the first approach for the realization of an outreach Water Cherenkov detector with SiPM.

Quantum Nature of Light

Download printable version Difficult Execution Time Data Analysis Radioactive Sources No Gamma Hardware setup This experiment guide is referred to the SP5600E/AN Educational Kit. Equipment SP5600E/AN- Educational Kit Purpose of the experiment Exploring the quantum nature of light thanks to bunches of photons emitted in a few nanoseconds by an ultra-fast LED and