Identifying light mesons which contain only up/down quarks (pions) from those containing a strange quark (kaons) over the typical meter length scales of a particle physics detector requires instrumentation capable of measuring flight times with a resolution on the order of 20ps. In the last few years a large number of inexpensive, multi-channel Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) chips have become available. These devices typically have timing resolution performance in the hundreds of ps regime. A technique is presented that is a monolithic version of ``time stretcher'' solution adopted for the Belle Time-Of-Flight system to address this gap between resolution need and intrinsic multi-hit TDC performance.
@article{arxiv.physics/0701275,
title = {A Monolithic Time Stretcher for Precision Time Recording},
author = {Gary S. Varner and Larry L. Ruckman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0701275},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
9 pages, 15 figures, minor corrections made, to appear as JINST_008P