Voltage Output

The response of a (real) detector is ultimately an electronic signal collected by an ADC or FADC [1] board on a crate. This may include:

  • cable length

  • shape of the signal (rise and fall times)

  • attenuation factors

  • hardware delays

  • etc

GEMC can provide a realistic output by using two user-customizable routines:

  1. chargeTime: this provides signal as seen by the electronics.

    • In a scintillator coupled with a photo-multiplier (PMT) this could be charge pulses arriving at different times on the face of the PMTs.

    • In a cherenkov detector it could be charge pulses caused by photon bunches arriving at different times on the face of the PMTs.

  2. voltage: this provides the shape of the voltage output.

The users also need to provide a translation table to relate the volume identifier to the electronic address (crate/slot/channel).

The user implementation of these functions is detailed below.

chargeTime function

The input to this function is the hit information, including energy deposited and time of every step in the hit.

The output is a map of arrays:

CT = map< int, vector <double> >

The users collect information from the various steps of the hits, and provide a collection of charges, each with its time, identifier and hardware address (crate, slot, channel):

  • CT[1]: chargeIndex

  • CT[2]: chargeAtElectronics

  • CT[3]: timeAtElectronics

  • CT[4]: identifiers

  • CT[5]: hardware

Example:

A scintillator paddle, identified by SECTOR=3, PANEL=1, PADDLE=15 is hit. The paddle correspond to the hardware address (crate, slot, channel) = (19, 3, 14).

The hit has 10 geant4 steps. These are collected in two charges.

The corresponding map will look like something like this:

  • CT[1]: {0, 1} (index of the two charges)

  • CT[2]: {0.333, 0.89} (the two charge values)

  • CT[3]: {22.45, 30.22} (the two charge times)

  • CT[4]: {3, 1, 15} (hit identifier, sector panel paddle)

  • CT[5]: {19, 3, 14} (hardware identifier, crate slot channel)

CT[0] must be filled with the hit number.

Voltage function

This function is used to provide GEMC with the voltage as a function of T. The input of this function are a charge, and time when that charge arrives at the electronics.

This function effectively provides, see Figure 1 below, the response of the electronic to a charge amount: the shape of the signal as a function of time.


../_images/voltageTime.png

Figure 1: the user provide a customized V(t) function, given the input Q (charge) and its time at the electronics

GEMC provides a built in function very similar to the one in Figure 1. It is called DGauss and can be tuned with a vector of parameters. Below is one example.

  • par[0] = 50; // delay, ns

  • par[1] = 10; // rise time, ns

  • par[2] = 20; // fall time, ns

  • par[3] = 1; // amplifier, charge to time

DGauss can be used directly in the Voltage function:

double ec_HitProcess :: voltage(double charge, double time, double forTime) {
               return DGauss(forTime, ecc.vpar, charge, time);
}

A complete chargeTime and voltage functions example can be found in the CLAS12 Calorimeter digitization.

Sampled Output (FADC)

Once chargeTime and voltage have been implemented, the resulting voltage vs time response of a detector is automatically sampled by gemc and provided in the output.

Users can control the sampling time and the number of samples with the TSAMPLING option:

-TSAMPLING="sampling time, total number of samples"

For example, -TSAMPLING=”4, 250” provides 250 voltage points, 4 nanoseconds apart.

Flash ADC (FADC) are a modern alternative to ADC and provide a sampled voltage output. With the voltage output mechanism, gemc effectively emulates FADC.


Footnotes