Bi-Weekly IIHE Internal Seminar: Thomas Meures, "Trigger and simulation issues inside the ARA detector"

Thursday 10 Nov 2011, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Brussels

Large Seminary Room (IIHE)

The Askar'yan Radio Array (ARA), a neutrino detector to be situated at the South Pole, will be sensitive to ultrahigh-energy cosmic neutrinos above 0.1 EeV and will have the greatest sensitivity within the favored energy range 0.1 EeV up to 10 EeV. Neutrinos of this energy are guaranteed by the current observations of the GZK-cutoff by the HiRes and the Pierre Auger Observatories. The detection method is based on Cherenkov emission by a neutrino induced cascade in the ice, coherent at radio wavelengths, which was predicted by Askar'yan in 1962 and verified in beam tests at SLAC in 2001. The experiment will start data taking in the beginning of 2012, after the first station is deployed. An advanced trigger system is very important for the data acquisition, since the antenna trigger rate is expected to be about 10 MHz. Smart filters have to be able to reduce this rate by a factor of 10^4 and an intelligent acquisition chip will be able to digitize events with a rate of 3kHz with no dead time. This presentation will give a general overview of the data acquisition system in the ARA experiment. Moreover the module which connects the trigger system to the data acquisition chip will be explained and the first steps of an actual filter development will be shown.