5.4: Report field data acquisition

To enable cutting edge materials research at the European Spallation Source (ESS), information about the sample and its environment conditions, like temperature, strain, or electric and magnetic field are as important as the collection of neutron event data. This BrightnESS task 5.2 deals with the collection of sample environment information at a higher rate than is routinely done at existing neutron scattering facilities, in order to be prepared for the demands of the high flux source that ESS will provide. This first deliverable of the task lays out the work that has been done so far to gather requirements, identify potential hard- and software solutions, as well as prepare for integrating the sample environment data stream into the general data acquisition chain. It concludes with a roadmap to get to a working demonstrator system by the end of the project. The main challenges are the accurate absolute timestamping of the sampled data, which makes full use of the advanced ESS timing system, as well as the need to support continuous data sampling at high rates, which is a rare operations mode for fast ADCs. The work has been carried out in close collaboration with the other tasks in WP5, the ESS Detector Group (largely in WP4), and the ESS Integrated Control Systems division (ICS).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17199/BRIGHTNESS.D5.4