DESIGN OF A DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM FOR COINCIDENCE MEASUREMENT OF RESONANT NUCLEAR REACTIONS IN INVERSE KINEMATICS

Abstract

This thesis presents the work on the modification of the existing data acquisition (DAQ) system for measuring the coincidences of proton and gamma particles in resonant nuclear reactions using the Thick Target Inverse Kinematics (TTIK) method. The aim was to enable the simultaneous detection of proton and gamma particles through the integration of the LaBr3 gamma detector into the initial DAQ system, which previously included only silicon detectors. The aim was reached by adding a second pair of ADC and TDC modules to the system and making corresponding changes in the configuration files for correct work of the modified DAQ system. Moreover, I developed a Python script for calibration of the detectors. The silicon detectors were successfully calibrated using the alpha source. Using the known energy values of the Ra-226 alpha decay, the raw data from the DAQ system was converted into energy-count spectra suitable for further analysis. Despite the successful integration of the new hardware components, the configuration issues in the spectclSetup.tcl did not allow a visualization of the data from the LaBr3 gamma detector. Overall, the work is fundamentally important for measuring the proton-gamma coincidences in the future experiments.