Pulse pile-up recovery for the front-end electronics of the PANDA electromagnetic calorimeter

At the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research near Darmstadt in Germany the PANDA detector will be employed to study the charmonium spectrum and to search for narrow exotic hadronic states, predicted by Quantum Chromodynamics. In the PANDA experiment, 1.5 to 15GeV/c anti-protons will annihilate with a hydrogen target at an average rate of 20 MHz. Among the sub-detectors of PANDA is the Electromagnetic Calorimeter (EMC) planned for the studies of electromagnetic transitions and neutral meson decays. Due to the high annihilation rates, the EMC will be exposed to single-detector hit rates up to 500 kHz, which may lead to pulse overlap. Hence, to recover the energy and time information of the overlapping pulses, a pulse pile-up recovery method is developed. The method is easy to implement in FPGA for online data processing. The Constant Fraction Timing algorithm is applied at the trailing edge to determine the time stamp of pile-up pulses. The energy and the time information of pile-up pulses can be recovered up to time differences of 50 ns, equal to the pulse rise-time, in a large dynamic energy range.