Readout electronics for low occupancy High-Pressure Gas TPCs
Abstract
HPgTPCs have benefits such as low energy threshold, magnetisability, and 4 acceptance, making them ideal for neutrino experiments such as DUNE. We present the design of an FPGA-based solution optimised for ND-GAr, which is part of the Phase-II more capable near detector for DUNE. These electronics reduce the cost significantly compared to using collider readout electronics which are typically designed for much higher occupancy and therefore, for example, need much larger numbers of FPGAs and power per channel. We demonstrate the performance of our electronics with the TOAD at Fermilab in the US at a range of pressures and gas mixtures up to 4.5barA, reading out ~10000 channels from a multi-wire proportional chamber. The operation took place between April and July of 2024. We measure the noise characteristics of the system to be sufficiently low and we identify sources of noise that can be further mitigated in the next iteration. We also note that the cooling scheme used in the test requires improvement before full-scale deployment. Despite these necessary improvements, we show that the system can fulfil the needs of a HPgTPC for a fraction of the price of collider readout electronics.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.17425,
title = {Readout electronics for low occupancy High-Pressure Gas TPCs},
author = {N. Khan and Y. Hua and I. Xiotidis and T. Alves and E. Atkin and G. Barker and D. Barrow and A. Booth and J. Borg and A. Bross and M. F. Cicala and L. Cremonesi and A. Deisting and K. Duffy and R. Gran and P. Green and A. Habig and M. Judah and T. Junk and A. Kaboth and A. Klustová and H. LeMoine and A. D. Marino and F. Martínez López and T. Mohayai and D. Naples and R. Nichol and D. Parker and M. Pfaff and J. Raaf and P. Rubinov and P. Singh and A. Srivastava and A. Waldron and L. Warsame and M. Wascko and A. Wilkinson and A. Ritchie-Yates and P. Dunne},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.17425},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
26 pages, 16 figures