Implementation of a digital data readout system for double-sided silicon strip detectors for ion and alpha particle spectroscopy

The experimental investigation of superheavy elements, one of the prominent research areas of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung (GSI), has reached a region of short-lived nuclei with expected lifetimes of the order of 1 μs. As signal processing times for conventional analogue front-end electronics are typically longer than 10 μs, new developments are mandatory. Continuously sampling ADCs with virtually no dead time are presently being implemented for various signal processing applications in particle and photon spectroscopy. In this paper, a new flash-ADC based data acquisition system (DAQ) is presented. It has been tested using an a source and heavy ion reaction measurements at GSI's UNILAC accelerator facility. In addition, a novel analysis algorithm has been implemented thus increasing the sensitive area of the double-sided silicon strip detector (DSSD) in use.