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Readout electronics of a prototype spectrometer for measuring low-energy ions in solar wind plasma

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Abstract

Readout electronics is developed for a prototype spectrometer for in situ measurement of low-energy ions of 30 eV/e–20 keV/e in the solar wind plasma. A low-noise preamplifier/discriminator (A111F) is employed for each channel to process the signal from micro-channel plate (MCP) detectors. A high-voltage (HV) supply solution based on a HV module and a HV optocoupler is adopted to generate a fast sweeping HV and a fixed HV. Due to limitation of telemetry bandwidth in space communication, an algorithm is implemented in an FPGA (field programmable gate array) to compress the raw data. Test results show that the electronics achieves a 1 MHz event rate and a large input dynamic range of 95 pC. A slew rate of 0.8 V/μs and an integral nonlinearity of 0.7-LSB for the sweeping HV, and a precision of less than 0.8 % for the fixed HV are obtained. A vacuum beam test shows an energy resolution of 12 ± 0.7 % full width at half maximum (FWHM) is achieved, and noise counts are less than 10/sec, indicating that the performance meets the physical requirement.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the support of collaboration team from CAS Key Laboratory of Geospace Environment (USTC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Particle Detection and Electronics (IHEP-USTC), Hefei, 230026, China

    Di Yang, Zhe Cao, Shu-Bin Liu, Chang-Qing Feng & Qi An

  2. Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Di Yang, Zhe Cao, Xi Qin, Shu-Bin Liu, Chang-Qing Feng & Qi An

  3. Division of Space Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Xin-Jun Hao

  4. CAS Key Laboratory of Geospace Environment, Hefei, 230026, China

    Xin-Jun Hao

Authors
  1. Di Yang
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  2. Zhe Cao
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  3. Xi Qin
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  4. Xin-Jun Hao
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  5. Shu-Bin Liu
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  6. Chang-Qing Feng
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  7. Qi An
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chang-Qing Feng.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Key Scientific Instrument and Equipment Development Projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41327802) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (WK2030040066).

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Yang, D., Cao, Z., Qin, X. et al. Readout electronics of a prototype spectrometer for measuring low-energy ions in solar wind plasma. NUCL SCI TECH 27, 135 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41365-016-0136-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41365-016-0136-0

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