Commissioning of an Ultra-fast Data Acquisition System for Coherent Synchrotron Radiation Detection

Abstract

The commissioning of a new real-time and high-accuracy data acquisition system suitable for recording individual ultra-short coherent pulses detected by fast terahertz detectors will be presented. The system is able to monitor turn-by-turn all buckets in streaming mode. The main board consists of a direct sampling board operating with a minimum sampling time of 3 psec and a time jitter less than 1.7 psec. The very low noise layout design combined with a wide dynamic range and bandwidth of the analog front-end allows to sample pulse signals generated by various GHz/THz detectors, like NbN and YBCO superconductor film detectors or zero biased Schottky Diode detectors. The digitized data is transmitted to the DAQ system by an FPGA readout board with a data transfer rate of 4 GByte/s. The setup is accomplished by a real-time data processing unit based on high-end graphics processors (GPUs) for on-line analysis of the frequency behaviour of the coherent synchrotron emissions. The system has been successfully used to study the beam properties of the ANKA synchrotron radiation source located at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and operating in the energy range between 0.5-2.5 GeV