Low Cost Data Acquisition Synchronization for Nuclear Physics Applications-

The DOE Office of Nuclear Physics (NP) seeks innovations that will advance our nation’s capability to perform nuclear physics research, and more specifically to improve DOE Nuclear Physics (NP)Facilities and the wider NP community experimental programs- For example, data acquisition (DAQ)for the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), currently under construction, will require considerable speed and flexibility in collecting data from its detectors- The fundamental requirement for success of such DAQ systems is that the data from each detector element be labeled with a precisely synchronized time stamps before transmission on the network-We are proposing two complementary low-cost time synchronization solutions whose hardware and software footprint will be minimal- The first innovation will enable extension and expansion of the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) digital DAQ system, which was instrumental to the research with highly segmented GRETINA and Digital Gammasphere (DGS)- This solution will have application at FRIB- The second innovation will enable precise, low-cost time stamping and time-correlated measurements in a wide variety of nuclear physics applications-