A common data acquisition system for high-intensity beam experiments

Abstract

The J-PARC facility, which will be ready in 2008, is being constructed to perform a number of experiments including nuclear physics, kaon decays and neutrino oscillation. The expected data acquisition rate ranges from 500 Hz to 10 kHz, which is significantly higher than those used in the existing small experiments at KEK. We have developed a new data acquisition system that can be used in a wide range of experiments at J-PARC. The system consists of a KEK-VME crate, a readout platform module and peripheral modules. The readout platform module is highly modularized, having four slots to install daughter cards for digitization and three PCI mezzanine card (PMC) slots for on-board data processing and other purposes. The performance of the platform module and a model setup of the data acquisition system are reported.