The Development and Performance Characterization of the Next Generation Electronics Designed for the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna
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2017-05
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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For nearly a century we have been observing the highest energy particles known to exists in the universe colliding with Earths atmosphere in the form of cosmic radiation. Despite our best experimental e orts throughout these decades to determine the sources of the universe's most energetic particles, we have yet to be successful in doing so. This remains to be one of the biggest unsolved mystery in particle astrophysics today. Cosmogenic neutrinos are ideal candidates for source identi- cation due their ability to reach Earth relatively unattenuated and unde ected by magnetic elds. The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment is a high altitude radio neutrino observatory designed to detect coherent radio emissions generated by ultra-high-energy cosmogenic neutrino interactions within the Antarctic ice sheet where the events can be reconstructed, and the ultra-high energy sources nally revealed. Given the limitations of previous ight electronics, particularly in the sampler and digitizer, various developments have resulted in substantial improvements to the ANITA instrument. Commercial analog to digital converters (ADCs) were considered for the ANITA experiment. However, given the power, cost, and size budget of the balloon borne payload, the use of these devices was infeasible. Therefore, a custom application speci c integrated circuit (ASIC) was developed at the University of Hawaii's Instrumentation Development Lab (IDL) to ful ll this purpose. The Large Analog Bandwidth Recorder with Ordered Readout version 4 revision D (LAB4D), is an ASIC featuring a 30% improvement in analog bandwidth (200{1300 Mega-Hertz), with a 20% increase in sampling frequency of 3.2 GSa/s (well above Nyquist) that remains stable even with temperature variations of several tens of degrees, with the ability to tune the timebase sampling o sets to be at least 30% less than previous versions, and with 3 times the sample window length (320 ns). This ASIC's unique functionality to trim the sample timebase non-uniformities using on-chip tunable digital-to-analog converters (DACs) which drastically reduce the need for lengthy calibrations during event post analysis, in addition to the many other performance improvements, makes the LAB4D speci cations a truly cutting-edge technology. The LAB4D has been developed into a compact Computer Bus Interconnect (cPCI) compatible printed circuit board, the Sampling Unit for Radio Frequencies version 5 (SURFv5), and will be integrated into the ANITA instrument crate. The development of characterization of the LAB4D + SURFv5 system, will be the most signi cant contribution I personal made towards an improved ANITA instrument and will be the main focus of this work. In addition to the LAB4D + SURFv5 system, there were other improved electronics developed for the ANITA instrument that I lead or played a key supporting role in. A trigger dedicated circuit board, the Latency Observation Notables Gleaning board (LONG), has been developed to receive all 96 channels of the ANITA instrument and perform various trigger logic decisions, allowing the instrument to select the preferred data to be digitized and stored for post analysis. vi The LONG has the potential for elaborate trigger schemes and an improved e ciency compared to previous ANITA electronics. A waveform based trigger system was developed in conjunction with a custom Real-time Independent Three-bit Converter version 3 (RITC3) ASIC, designed to ful ll this purpose. The RITC3 was developed into a cPCI compatible printed circuit board as well, and is to be integrated with future ANITA instruments. Previous ANITA ights were plagued by unknown anthropogenic noise sources. The response to this, and the nal improvement to the ANITA instrument that will be discussed in this work, is a front end, tunable, bandstop ltration and ampli cation system. The Tunable Universal Front-end Filter (TUFF) is a printed circuit board with six RF channels, each with three tunable band stop lters programmable via variable capacitors and also acts as a pre-ampli er providing 40 dB of gain. The addition of these improved electronics is part of the larger e ort to increase the sensitivity of the ANITA instrument and set stronger cosmogenic neutrino ux limits.
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Analog to Digital Converters, Neutrino Physics, High Energy Physics Instrumentation
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