Bi-Weekly IIHE Internal Seminar: Thomas Meures, "Online trigger development for the ARA detector".

Thursday 25 Oct 2012, 10:00 → 10:30 Europe/Brussels

IIHE Large Seminar 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. First data are taken since the beginning of 2011 and are currently being analyzed. Since the noise is expected to consist dominantly of the thermal antenna noise, an advanced trigger system can enhance the sensitivity by distinguishing radio waves from thermal triggers. The antenna trigger rate from noise is expected to be about 10 MHz. Smart filters have to be able to reduce this rate by a factor of 10^4 to reduce it to the possible digitization rate of an intelligent acquisition chip, which can digitize events with a rate of O(100Hz) with no dead time. This presentation will give a general overview of the ARA experiment. Moreover the trigger system and the data acquisition chip will be explained and the first results of an actual filter development will be shown.