[Halld-cal] BCAL beam test in Hall-B: electronics

[Zisis Papandreou]

Hi Sascha:

we had a discussion yesterday during our Calorimetry Working Group 
meeting about the equipment that would be needed for a BCAL beam test in 
Hall B (in the event that we manage to pull this off before shutdown).  
Someone mentioned that you had looked into the issue of electronics and 
that enough flash250 boards, etc, should be available and that a second 
DAQ could be set up, in the event that the FCAL is still taking data.

I would like to get this discussion rolling since we need to plan ahead 
of time to get everything in place.

We are thinking of fully instrumenting the BCAL Mini Cal, with 80 SiPMs 
plus their electronics.  I am not sure if cooling is possible in Hall B 
(Elton and Tim may answer this).  We plan to add a few 5 -10(?) 
scintillators as triggers, using PMTs (we need to check stray fields in 
alcove -- floor should be ok).  I am assuming that Fernando and Tim will 
provide us with a setup including the summing (into towers) boards, to 
mimic the eventual experiment.  In that case, we know the number of ADC 
and TDC channels we need, although for this test I would like us to 
instrument the outer layers with the F1TDCs.  Ditto for discriminators, 
I hope. We, will of course, need the crates for these, trigger module, 
etc all the way to the online software.

It is not clear to me who will do all this.  We at Regina will do all 
the offline software for analysis, and we will have people down for 
setup and data taking.  We need to discuss all these things starting 
next Tuesday morning during the readout meeting.

John says that the updated schedule in Hall B will have some small 
installation time in early March.  If this is the case, we should 
discuss how to take advantage of this.  One scenario has us use that 
time to at least get cables and electronics in place, even if the SiPMs 
are not ready.  Once the Mini Cal is ready (everything can be mounted on 
it, say, in the ESB and then moved as one piece into the hall and 
quickly cabled.  Such a scenario might require access to the hall for a 
few hours (1-2 if all else is in place), to position and cable it.

The starting point could be the alcove, as the FCAL should be out on the 
floor by then.  If we have 5 pass beam, at 5% in the alcove we'll get ~ 
275MeV e- in the Mini Cal.  On the floor at 5 pass we'll get 1.8 GeV at 
the 30% location.  If we have time we can consider going further up in 
energy.

All these things need to be discussed.

Finally, but most importantly, we need to get a proposal done to be 
submitted by Eugene to Volker. I will work on this.  Fortunately, much 
of the hard work has been done be Indiana and their proposal will be 
used as a reference. And I know there is other paperwork as well: TOSP, 
ESAD, RSAD, but we can probably just tweak the 2006 ones 
<https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/Beam_Test_Run_Plan#Safety> to 
reflect the tagger alcove and floor (as opposed to the beam dump area 
alcove in 2006).

There is much more, but I better stop here.  I'll have this item on the 
Feb 7 BCAL Readout meeting.  I am hoping for a good attendance.

Cheers, Zisis...

P.S. The Wiki page for all this is at: 
https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/BCAL_Beam_Tests_2012

-- 
Prof. Zisis Papandreou, Ph.D., P.Phys.
Department of Physics      |  tel.:     (306) 585-5379
University of Regina          |  fax.:     (306) 585-5659
Regina, SK  S4S 0A2        |  email:  zisis at uregina.ca
Web:  http://web.me.com/zisis/professional/
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