Abstract
We report on the recent development of a versatile analog front-end compatible with a negative-ion μ-TPC for a directional dark matter search as well as a dual-phase, next-generation \U0001d4aa(10 kt) liquid argon TPC to study neutrino oscillations, nucleon decay, and astrophysical neutrinos. Although the operating conditions for negative-ion and liquid argon TPCs are quite different (room temperature vs. ∼88 K operation, respectively), the readout electronics requirements are similar. Both require a wide-dynamic range up to 1600 fC, and less than 2000–5000 e− noise for a typical signal of 80 fC with a detector capacitance of Cdet ≈ 300 pF. In order to fulfill such challenging requirements, a prototype ASIC was newly designed using 180-nm CMOS technology. Here, we report on the performance of this ASIC, including measurements of shaping time, dynamic range, and equivalent noise charge (ENC). We also demonstrate the first operation of this ASIC on a low-pressure negative-ion μ-TPC.
Highlights
2019 JINST 14 T01008 electronegative gas molecules to form negative ions [7]
The signal timescale for liquid argon (LAr)-TPCs is similar to that of the NI μ-TPC since the ionization electrons drift in the liquid
The wide dynamic range requirement applies to the LAr time projection chamber (LAr-TPC)
Summary
To evaluate the circuit properties, the ASIC was directly mounted on a test board before connecting to a detector. As for the dynamic architecture, we needed bias optimization before injecting test pulses This is because the default bias settings obtained from simulation did not provide appropriate conditions to the ASIC, and we observed the following phenomena: (1) the measured pulse height was 2–3 times smaller than the simulation for the default bias voltages, and (2) the effect of the detector capacitance Cdet was worse than predicted, i.e. the gain decreases rapidly as Cdet increases. Three-dimensional track reconstruction was hindered due to this effect, we successfully demonstrated that the LTARS ASIC could successfully read out signal charges from the Micromegas with a very low gain of ∼ 100 and a strip pitch of 200 μm
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