Eletrônica de front-end do experimento Neutrinos-Angra

Abstract

The Neutrinos Angra Experiment aims to develop a compact detector and new techniques to measure the antineutrinos flow of nuclear reactions occurring inside the nuclear power plant reactors, allowing monitoring of its instant energy dissipation and revealing the composition of fissile nuclear fuel. This study presents the development of the Front-end electronics of the Neutrinos Angra detector. The electronics should perform the conditioning of the signals from photomultiplier tubes, aiming to provide a fast pulse for the data acquisition system whitch could facilitate the identification of the antineutrinos flow through the detector. In this work, the specifications of the front-end were defined based on the experiment requirements, which are: linear operating range 0-50 photons; ability to identify a single photon; the pulse duration less than a few µs; bandwidth of the pulse smaller than 60 MHz; maximum range in the output up to 2 V. For this, a topology of the front-end circuit has been proposed, consisting of four subsystems: power circuit; signal conditioning circuit; offset control circuit and discriminator circuit. Eight modules were produced to equip the detector. In this study three modules were evaluated. Tests showed that the performance of three modules met the specifications, with an average calibration of 7.4±0.6 V/V , rise time of 26 ±1 ns, falltime of 81 ±2.5 ns, width at half height of 74±1 ns, linearity better than 2.2% and saturation starting around 1.4 V.