A Front-End Test Stand for the Analog ASICs of the ATLAS LAr Calorimeter HL-LHC Upgrade

International audienceThis paper describes the development of a common front-end test stand for the analog ASICs, which are part of the effort to develop the front-end electronics for the ATLAS LAr calorimeter HL-LHC (High Luminosity LHC) upgrade. The common test stand consists of the front-end test board, toy calorimeters, ASIC mezzanine boards and the DAQ system. The front-end test board is the bridge between the DAQ system and the ASIC mezzanine, it integrates two 16-channel ADCs for digitizing the outputs of the analog ASIC and a calibration pulse generator for detector signal injection. The analog ASICs under test are mounted on the ASIC mezzanine boards, their outputs are connected to the front-end test board through an FMC connector. A Xilinx ZC706 evaluation board is utilized as the DAQ board for this test stand, a Gigabit Ethernet link is implemented on the DAQ board for slow control, configuration and ADC data transmission. The tests of two front-end analog ASICs with this test stand are ongoing. The preliminary test results demonstrated that this test stand is suitable for the testing of the multi-channel analog ASICs developed for the LAr Calorimeter HL-LHC upgrade

First observations of speed of light tracks by a fluorescence detector looking down on the atmosphere

International audienceEUSO-Balloon is a pathfinder mission for the Extreme Universe Space Observatory onboard the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM-EUSO). It was launched on the moonless night of the 25th of August 2014 from Timmins, Canada. The flight ended successfully after maintaining the target altitude of 38 km for five hours. One part of the mission was a 2.5 hour underflight using a helicopter equipped with three UV light sources (LED, xenon flasher and laser) to perform an inflight calibration and examine the detectors capability to measure tracks moving at the speed of light. We describe the helicopter laser system and details of the underflight as well as how the laser tracks were recorded and found in the data. These are the first recorded laser tracks measured from a fluorescence detector looking down on the atmosphere. Finally, we present a first reconstruction of the direction of the laser tracks relative to the detector