SYNCHRONIZATION OF MOTION AND DETECTORS AND CONTINUOUS SCANS AS THE STANDARD DATA ACQUISITION TECHNIQUE

Alba [1] is a third generation synchrotron located near Barcelona in Spain. This paper describes the model, objectives and implementation of a generic data acquisition structure for an experimental station, which integrates the hardware and software synchronization of motors, detectors, shutters and in general any experimental channel or events related with the experiment. The implementation involves the management of hardware triggers, which can be derived from time, position of encoders or other sources such as events from the particle accelerator, combined with timestamps for guaranteeing the correct integration of fast triggered or slow software channels. The infrastructure requires a complex management of buffers of different sources, centralized and distributed, including interpolation procedures. ALBA uses Sardana [2][3] built on TANGO[4] as the generic control system for the accelerators and beamlines, which provides the