Digital Electronics for the Pierre Auger Observatory AMIGA Muon Counters

Abstract

The "Auger Muons and Infill for the Ground Array" (AMIGA) project provides direct muon counting capacity to the Pierre Auger Observatory and extends its energy detection range down to 0.3 EeV. It currently consists of 61 detector pairs (a Cherenkov surface detector and a buried muon counter) distributed over a 23.5 km2 area on a 750 m triangular grid. Each counter relies on segmented scintillator modules storing a logical train of '0's and '1's on each scintillator segment at a given time slot. Muon counter data is sampled and stored at 320 MHz allowing both the detection of single photoelectrons and the implementation of an offline trigger designed to mitigate multi-pixel PMT crosstalk and dark rate undesired effects. Acquisition is carried out by the digital electronics built around a low power Cyclone III FPGA. This paper presents the digital electronics design, internal and external synchronization schemes, hardware tests, and first results from the Observatory.

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory
• Prototype muon detectors for the AMIGA component of the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Muon Counting using Silicon Photomultipliers in the AMIGA detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Design, upgrade and characterization of the silicon photomultiplier front-end for the AMIGA detector at the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Design and implementation of the AMIGA embedded system for data acquisition
• Simulation study of the correlation ($X_{max}^{\mu }$, $N^{\mu }$) in view of obtaining information on primary mass of the UHECRs