Application of Virtual Instrumentation in Nuclear Physics Experiments

Abstract

The new way in the design of computer-based measurement systems can be seen in the use of up-to-date measurement, control and testing systems based on reliable devices. Digital signal processing (DSP) is used in all engineering areas, such as in nuclear physics experiments, to in order replace conventional analog systems and to build measurement and test systems with an easy configuration, user-friendly interface, and possibility to run sophisticated experiments. DSP systems are applied in nuclear physics experiments for their performance in both energy and time domain. Different programming techniques and instrument solutions are employed, and many commercially available digital oscilloscopes can be used in DSP systems. Nowadays, nuclear DSP systems are commonly realized by the virtual instrumentation (VI) technique performed in LabVIEW graphical programming environment. The advantages of this approach lie in the use of (a) ready-to-start measurement functions (DSP algorithms), (b) instrument drivers delivered with measurement devices, and (c) in the possibility to improve a particular system when new algorithms, drivers or devices are available. With these opportunities, a system using the VI techniques and based on commercially available devices (USB, PCI, PXI etc.) can be driven by any suitable developed application. This application is then nearly “hardware platform independent”. Many papers concerning nuclear physics experiments have been published so far and in many of them, LabVIEW has been successfully applied. This chapter focuses on the description of the nuclear systems, which use the VI concept as much as possible, and in which a large number of system functions are performed in the software form. As the first example, it can be mentioned the development of a computer-based nuclear radiation detection and instrumentation teaching laboratory system (Ellis & He, 1993), where the sophisticated setup of various devices is presented. Simulation and analysis of nuclear instrumentation using the LabVIEW is performed in ref. (Abdel-Aal, 1993). The high-performance digitizer system for high-energy and nuclear physics detector instrumentation employed in ref. (Kirichenko et al., 2001), is a time digitizing system in the VXI system. An FPGA-based digital and elaboration system for nuclear fast pulse detection (Esposito et al., 2007) is used for the direct sampling of fast pulses from nuclear detectors. Virtual instrumentation in physics described in (Tlaczala, 2005) presents applications for γ-rays intensity analyzer, data analysis and presentation. Models of