Speaker
Description
The ongoing work on the development and testing of a prototype of a Micromegas (MM) detector and its front end electronics will be presented. Presently a revision of the front-end electronics with a new discharge protection circuit is being tested and results will be discussed. Moreover, a first insight on the development of a new ASIC for the MM readout will be provided.
For the AMBER (NA66) experiment several upgrades of the COMPASS (NA58) spectrometer are foreseen for the medium and long-term AMBER program. Among this R&D program the replacement of a part of the COMPASS Multi-Wire Proportional Chambers (MWPCs) is planned, to face
up the aging of some of the structural elements of the MWPC chambers. Our main candidate technology to substitute the most aged MWPCs is the presently well-established Micro-Pattern Gaseous Detectors (MPGD).
This R&D project started with testing our non-resistive floating mesh MM detector with the TIGER-based front-end initially designed for the Cylindrical GEM detector of BESIII experiment. Those tests comprised laboratory tests and test beam campaigns.
The main difficulty we had to face up was regarding the Electro-Static Discharge (ESD) protection circuit of the FE cards. For this reason, we designed a new revision of the front-end board with a new protection circuit which aims on a single channel discharge quenching, thus enhancing the detector stability and reducing aging.
