Design and performance evaluation of front-end electronics for COMET straw tracker

Abstract The COMET experiment at J-PARC aims to search for the charged lepton flavor violating process of neutrinoless muon-to-electron conversion with an improvement of a sensitivity by a factor of 10000 to the current limit. We plan to use a straw tube tracker with high momentum resolution as an electron detector. To read out the signal from the tracker precisely, optimal front-end electronics is needed, and we have developed the readout electronics board called ROESTI, which contains all the front-end processes; preamplification, pulse shaping, discrimination, and digitization. All the functionalities are controlled by FPGA. Using the prototype, we have constructed the calibration method and evaluated the fundamental performance. In this paper, we report the details of the design and performance for the ROESTI prototype.