Ultra-High-Energy Neutrinos at
AUTEC:
Phase 2 Installation
G.Gratta and J.Vandenbroucke, May 16, 2003
The experience acquired
with the data-set collected until now allows us to envisage a second phase of
our work on ultra-high-energy neutrino detection at AUTEC. The upgrades, using better
hardware and software, would permit us to undertake an improved data collection
phase that would probably last about two years.
We hope to be able to
install a new system that would
After discussions with
David Devau we see the possibility of using the new array as very interesting. Its main pros (for us) are:
o Larger volume (we would
like to have a more exact definition of this. Ideally we would like to have a table with the coordinates
of all phone in the new system)
o Access to all phones from
Site 1
o Lower noise (also here we
would like to have more technical information)
It is important to
understand that there is also a disadvantage. The phone spacing in the 7-phone system used till now
is marginal. The new array will
make this spacing even more marginal. Hence it is essential that we will be able to
readout, together with the new system, also the 2 7-phone fine tracking
clusters that according to David are now wired so that they can be readout with
the new array from Site 1.
Are these 14 phones included in count of 92 phones that Dave gave us for
the new system ?
Finally we would like to
make sure that the interface and signal properties are well defined and
understood. We would
bring in a number of PCs (exact number to be determined after we have the exact
number and map of the phones, probably we will have 1 PC for ever ~10 phones) equipped
with commercial 50 Ω
digitizer cards. There
should be BNC connectors from where to connect to the phones signals. During data-taking (that is
when AUTEC will decide that our system can be connected) we will have access to
the continuous analog output of each of the phones used. We understand that such
analog signal derives from a ADC-digital transmission-DAC system, so that it
will be band limited to the sampling speed of the ADC/DAC of ~40 kHz. This applies also to the 2 7-phone fine
tracking sites. We also would like
(at some low priority) to record GPS time for the events we record. This could be done by
tapping into an AUTEC GPS signal or by installing our own receiver, whichever
is simpler.
The data collected by this
cluster of computers will be passed to a central computer on a dedicated
100BaseT connection. This
computer will further analyze the data and write to disk We hope that we will allowed
to have a very limited FTP connection to our computers for
troubleshooting. The data,
however, will be shipped to Stanford on an external hard drive as it was done
in the past.
The installation would
probably proceed as follows: