Dynamic tunable notch filters for the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA)

Abstract

The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) is a NASA long-duration balloon experiment with the primary goal of detecting ultra-high-energy ($>10^{18}\,\mbox{eV}$) neutrinos via the Askaryan Effect. The fourth ANITA mission, ANITA-IV, recently flew from Dec 2 to Dec 29, 2016. For the first time, the Tunable Universal Filter Frontend (TUFF) boards were deployed for mitigation of narrow-band, anthropogenic noise with tunable, switchable notch filters. The TUFF boards also performed second-stage amplification by approximately 45 dB to boost the $\sim\,μ\mbox{V-level}$ radio frequency (RF) signals to $\sim$ mV-level for digitization, and supplied power via bias tees to the first-stage, antenna-mounted amplifiers. The other major change in signal processing in ANITA-IV is the resurrection of the $90^{\circ }$ hybrids deployed previously in ANITA-I, in the trigger system, although in this paper we focus on the TUFF boards. During the ANITA-IV mission, the TUFF boards were successfully operated throughout the flight. They contributed to a factor of 2.8 higher total instrument livetime on average in ANITA-IV compared to ANITA-III due to reduction of narrow-band, anthropogenic noise before a trigger decision is made.

arXiv comment27 pages, 19 figures

References in corpus (5)

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• Observations of the Askaryan Effect in Ice
• The Large Analog Bandwidth Recorder And Digitizer with Ordered Readout (LABRADOR) ASIC
• LAB4D: A Low Power, Multi-GSa/s, Transient Digitizer with Sampling Timebase Trimming Capabilities
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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Constraints on the ultra-high energy cosmic neutrino flux from the fourth flight of ANITA
• The Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO): A White Paper
• A comprehensive analysis of anomalous ANITA events disfavors a diffuse tau-neutrino flux origin
• Unusual Near-horizon Cosmic-ray-like Events Observed by ANITA-IV
• The Simulation of the Sensitivity of the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) to Askaryan Radiation from Cosmogenic Neutrinos Interacting in the Antarctic Ice
• Antarctic Surface Reflectivity Calculations and Measurements from the ANITA-4 and HiCal-2 Experiments