What's all the buzz about the GECO2020, and what exactly is it ?!

 GECO2020 is the all new CAEN General Control Software for over 250 High Voltage and Low Voltage Boards and Systems.

              

It features:

• Innovative GUI
• Dashboard capability:Allows to manage all the CAEN Power Supplies in any form factor
• Supports Linux & Windows
• Handles all the communication links provided in CAEN Power Supplies:
• Ethernet
• USB
• Optical Link
• Wi-Fi

GECO2020 brings the High Voltage control and management via external Host PC to an unprecedented level of easiness and compatibility.
 

Smaller accelerators for particle physics?

It took every inch of the Large Hadron Collider's 27 km (16.8 mile) length to accelerate particles to energies high enough to discover the Higgs boson. Now, imagine an accelerator that could do the same thing in, say, the length of a football field. Or less.

That is the promise of laser-plasma accelerators, which use lasers instead of high-power radio-frequency waves to energize electrons in very short distances. Scientists have grappled with building these devices for two decades, and a new theoretical study predicts that this may be easier than previously thought.

 

The authors are Carlo Benedetti, Carl Schroeder, Eric Esarey, and Wim Leemans, physicists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center. Their paper, "Plasma wakefields driven by an incoherent combination of laser pulses: A path towards high-average power laser-plasma accelerators," appears in the May Special Issue of Physics of Plasmas, from AIP Publishing.

 

Click for complete article

 

 

CAEN MC2 Analyzer officially released!

The CAEN MC² Analyzer has been specifically designed for digitizers running the Digital Pulse Processing for the Pulse Height Analysis (DPP-PHA) firmware as the DT5780 Dual Digital MCA. This software is able to completely control and manage a set of boards acquiring data simultaneously, making therefore a multi-board system a "Multichannel - Multichannel Analyzer".

MC² Analyzer allows the user to set all the relevant DPP-PHA parameters for each acquisition channel (trigger threshold, trapezoidal filter parameters, etc.), handle the communication with the connected boards, run the data acquisition and plot both waveforms for on-line monitoring of the acquisition and histograms. It can also control the HV power supplies provided in DT5780. Moreover, it is able to perform advanced mathematical analysis on both the online and collected spectra: peak search, background subtraction, peak fitting, energy calibration, ROI selection, dead time compensation, histogram rebin and other features available.

Digital Neutron-Gamma discrimination with Liquid Scintillators

In recent years CAEN has developed a complete family of digitizers that consists of several models differing in sampling frequency, resolution, form factor and other features. Besides the use of the digitizers as waveform recorders (oscilloscope mode), CAEN offers the possibility to upload special versions of the FPGA firmware that implement algorithms for the Digital Pulse Processing (DPP); when the digitizer runs in DPP mode, it becomes a new instrument that represents a complete digital replacement of most traditional modules such as Multi-Channel Analyzers (MCAs), QDCs, TDCs, Discriminators and many others. In this application note, CAEN describes the capability of the series x720 (12 bit, 250MSps) to perform neutron-gamma discrimination based upon the digital pulse shape analysis. The development of this FPGA firmware was based upon liquid scintillating detectors of type BC501-A.

 

All detector and neutron/gamma source based tests were performed at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) on the campus of the Duke University in collaboration with Prof. Mohammad W. Ahmed.

13th Int. Conference on Muon Spin Rotation, Relaxation & Resonance

June 1-6, 2014. The 13th International Conference on Muon Spin Rotation, Relaxation and Resonance (μSR2014) is to be held in Grindelwald, Switzerland, from Sunday, June 1st to Friday, June 6th, 2014. It is organized by the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), the University of Zurich and the University of Fribourg.

 

The conference provides a forum to researchers from around the world with interests in the applications of μSR to study a wide range of topics including condensed matter physics, materials and molecular sciences, chemistry and biology. The Conference will consist of invited and contributed talks as well as poster sessions.
 

Energy Resolution & Linearity of the CAEN MCA DT5780

The Digital Multi Channel Analyzer DT5780 represents the synthesis of CAEN's long lasting experience in high voltage power supplies and in digital acquisition systems. The device houses two HV channels with ±5 kV maximum voltage and two 14 bit acquisition channels with 100 MS/s sampling rate. The device allows through its internal logic to require coincidences and anti‐coincidences between events triggered by the two acquisition channels.

In the present Application Note we report the results obtained in internal tests of the Digital Multi Channel Analyzer DT5780. We are going to show the resolution of the energy measurement of gamma and X rays obtained with a HPGe detector. The wide spectrum of energy available allows also to obtain a preliminary test of the linearity of our MCA. We want underline that this test is preliminary and does not take into account the nonlinearity of the HPGe detector and the preamplifier, and possible dependencies on the event acquisition rate.

Click to download application note PDF

Click for technical details on DT5780
 

Powerful Solution for the Emulation of Any Detection Setup

The Digital Detector Emulator is a multichannel instrument for the emulation of radiation detection systems. The algorithm is initialized by a reference pulse shape, with statistical distribution of amplitude and time. Then a statistical stream of events is generated according to the input distributions. The events can be also selectively summed together simulating the pile-up phenomenon. An arbitrarily generated noise and a baseline drift can be superimposed to each pulse.

Therefore, the instrument is not a pulse generator of recorded shapes, but it is a synthesizer of random pulses compliant with programmable statistical distributions of energy spectrum, time distribution, and pulse shape. The stream of emulated signals becomes a statistical sequence of pulses, reflecting the programmed input features (e.g. energy spectrum, time distribution, noise, signal shape, etc.). When the emulation process is reset, the kernels of generators can be either re-initialized with new random data making the sequence always different, or they can be stored to reproduce the same sequence many times.