Digital Pulse Processing for Physics Applications

Nowadays, the availability of very fast and high precision ADC chips has driven physicists and engineers to realize acquisition systems in which the analog-to-digital conversion is performed as close as possible to the detector. This approach is reversed with respect to more traditional acquisition chains which were made out of mainly analog circuits with the A- to-D conversion at the end of the chain. The use of fast digitizers to acquire signals coming from radiation detectors opens new possibilities and make the front-end and readout electronics much more flexible and compact. The extraction of the quantities of interest, such as energy, timing, etc. is now performed on the digital data stream by means of dedicated digital pulse processing (DPP) algorithms.The purpose of this Digital Pulse Processing Workshop is to present the basic principle of operation of a waveform digitizer with DPP capabilities and how it can be used for physics applications.

Agenda:

10.00 Description of the hardware of the waveform digitizers:
• Digitizer Models
• Architecture
• Synchronization and Trigger Distribution
• Acquisition Modes
• Use of digitizers in the acquisition of physics events

10:30 Description of DPP algorithms for physics applications:
• Principle of operation and purposes of the Digital Pulse Processing
• Zero suppression
• Trapezoidal filters for the peak height analysis (digital MCA)
• Digital charge integration (readout of SiPM and PMT)
• Gamma-neutron discrimination
• Digital CFD and timing measurements.

11:30 Presentation of results obtained during our tests with different types of digitizer and DPP:
• Gamma spectroscopy in HPGe and Si detectors
• Single photon counting with SiPMs
• Spectroscopy with scintillators (NaI and LaBr)
• Gamma Neutron discrimination with liquid scintillators
• High resolution timing measurements
• Overview of the Digital Detector Emulator

12:30 Lunch

14:00 Practical demonstration with real detector and source and DDE

15:30 Questions and discussion