Abstract
The Auger Muon Infill Ground Array (AMIGA) is part of the AugerPrime upgrade of the Pierre Auger Observatory. It consists of particle counters buried 2.3 m underground next to the water-Cherenkov stations that form the 23.5 km2 large infilled array. The reduced distance between detectors in this denser area allows the lowering of the energy threshold for primary cosmic ray reconstruction down to about 1017 eV. At the depth of 2.3 m the electromagnetic component of cosmic ray showers is almost entirely absorbed so that the buried scintillators provide an independent and direct measurement of the air showers muon content. This work describes the design and implementation of the AMIGA embedded system, which provides centralized control, data acquisition and environment monitoring to its detectors. The presented system was firstly tested in the engineering array phase ended in 2017, and lately selected as the final design to be installed in all new detectors of the production phase. The system was proven to be robust and reliable and has worked in a stable manner since its first deployment.
Highlights
The surface detector array (SD) of Auger is composed of an extensive array of about 1600 water Cherenkov detectors (WCD), separated by a 1500 m spacing and covering an area of 3000 km2
As above 5 × 1019 eV, the flux is of around 1 particle per km2 per century, the large area of the observatory allows to study more than 30 high energy cosmic rays per year [1]
In this paper we describe the features of the embedded system design for the Auger Muon Infill Ground Array (AMIGA) buried scintillator detectors, dubbed Underground Muon Detector (UMD)
Summary
The Pierre Auger Observatory [1] was originally designed to study ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECR) with primary particle energy above 3 × 1018 eV. The main function for the AMIGA Data Acquisition System is to manage the data transfer from the muon counters in a modular, flexible, configurable and scalable fashion compatible with the Pierre Auger Observatory data trigger. These characteristics led to specifications on how to design the firmware, software, hardware, network structure and protocol, and the monitoring system. In this paper we describe the features of the embedded system design for the AMIGA buried scintillator detectors, dubbed Underground Muon Detector (UMD) This description includes the electronics, as well as the synchronization with the associated SD station. We must mention that the UMDs work as muon counters, using two types of detection: 1 bit multichannel digitalization, one for each of the 64 channels, and a 14 bit Analog to Digital Converter with two independent channels that measure the charge of the signal from the 64 channels for a muon count that exceeds 64 muons
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