New data acquisition system for beam loss monitor used in J-PARC main ring

A new data acquisition system has been developed continually as a part of the development of a new beam loss monitor (BLM) system for the J-PARC main ring. This development includes a newly designed front-end isolation amp that uses photo-couplers and a VME-based new analog-to-digital converter (ADC) system. Compared to the old amp, the new amp has a 10 times higher conversion impedance for the input current to the output voltage; this value is 1 M Omega. Moreover, the bandwidth was improved to from DC to 50 kHz, which is about two orders of magnitude greater than the previously used bandwidth. The theoretical estimations made in this study roughly agree with the frequency response obtained for the new system. The new ADC system uses an onboard field-programmable gate array chip for signal processing. By replacing the firmware of this chip, changes pertaining to future accelerator upgrade plans may be introduced into the new ADC system; in addition, the ADC system can be used in other applications. The sampling speed of the system is 1 MS/s, and it exhibits a 95 dBc spurious-free dynamic range and 16.5 effective number of bits. The obtained waveform and integrated charge data are compared with two reference levels in the ADC system. If the data exceeds the reference level, the system generates an alarm to dump the beams. By using the new data acquisition system, it was proved that the new BLM system shows a wide dynamic range of 160 dB. In this study, the details of the new data acquisition system are described. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).