DEVELOPMENT OF A HIGH RESOLUTION TIMING ALGORITHM FOR VANDLE

摘要

The recently commissioned Versatile Array of Neutron Detectors at Low Energy (VANDLE)~1 was designed to measure neutron energies from nuclear excited states populated through beta decay or transfer reactions. Because the neutron energy is determined by the time-of-flight technique, a time resolution better than 1 ns is necessary. Another important design requirement was a low amplitude detection threshold needed to measure neutron energies as low as 100 keV. A fully digital data acquisition system has been developed using XIAs DGF Pixie-16 hardware. These goals have been met via essential technical developments: an algorithm for the extraction of sub-sample time information from digitized waveforms and a new triggering scheme. Both of these advancements were critical to achieve the design goals for VANDLE.