Abstract:
Micromegas detector has the advantages of high spatial resolution, large area and easy processing. It is widely used in particle physics experiments, medical imaging and industrial inspection. As the demand for spatial resolution and detection areas in particle physics experiments grows, so does the field of Micromegas detectors. Advancements in etching and printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing are leading to increasingly refined readout units and larger detection areas. The number of detector channels is also significantly increasing. A 512-channel highly integrated front-end electronics (compact front-end electronics, Compact_FEC) was designed and implemented for the multi-channel readout requirements of Micromegas detectors. The front-end electronics board mainly consists of a detector signal readout module, a data acquisition module and a power supply module. The detector signal readout module uses a current-based readout chip, ADAS1128. The chip consists of 128 current integral amplifiers, sample-and-hold circuits, two 24-bit resolution ADCs and a digital processing section, among others, which enables the measurement of multi-channel charge. The data acquisition module consists of an FPGA core board, USB 3.0 circuits, and Gigabit Ethernet. The main functions of the module include the configuration of the chip, chip data acquisition, and communication interaction with the host computer. The performance of the front-end electronics was first tested under floating input conditions. The gain of charge measurement is about 213.6 Code/fC in the dynamic range of −77.93-0 fC. The integration nonlinearity is 2.7%, and the noise is less than 0.7 fC. Furthermore, to validate the performance of the detector system, X-ray energy resolution tests were performed with the
55Fe radioactive source, and spatial resolution tests were performed with cosmic rays for track reconstruction. The X-ray full peak and Ar escape peak can be observed; the energy resolution of the full peak is about 20.23%@5.9 keV, and the ratio of the full energy peak and escape peak is about 2.09∶1. Since the charge center of gravity method is used in cosmic ray muon test to reconstruct the Muon hit bositions, the response of the cosmic ray muon energy deposited in Micromegas detector was first tested. The test results show that the spectrum of ionization energy deposited by Muon is well-matched to the Landau-Gaussian distribution. The muon hit bositions test results for the
x-direction spatial resolution is 0.240 mm, and for the
y-direction spatial resolution is 0.243 mm. In summary, Compact_FEC can detect signals from the Micromegas detector in single-particle measurement mode.