Graphical Environmental Tools for Application to Gamma-Ray Energy Tracking Arrays

70408 Highly segmented, position-sensitive germanium detector systems are being developed for nuclear physics research where traditional electronic processing with mixed analog and digital function blocks would be enormously complex and costly. Future systems will be constructed using pipelined processing of high-speed digitized signals, as in the telecommunications industry. This project will use digital signal processing concepts and existing graphical system design tools to develop a set of reusable modular functions and tools targeted for the nuclear physics community. Researchers working with complex nuclear detector arrays such as the Gamma Ray Energy Tracking Array (GRETA) will be able to construct data processing concepts through simple graphical interfaces. Phase I includes the modeling of complex nuclear pulse processing functions; test, evaluation, and adaptation of a graphical environment toolset to implement these data acquisition functions; and embodiment of representative functions within field programmable gate arrays. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: Successful implementation of nuclear-physics-specific functions should be immediately applicable to related fields requiring real time analysis of digitized streams of data. Interest would extend to chemical analysis, medical instrumentation, environmental monitoring, imaging, ultrasonics and astronomy.