Speaker
Description
The pursuit of experimental nuclear physics at both the teaching as well as research level is,
at times, prohibitively difficult owing to the required resources and allied expenses. In
addition to the expenditures, the burden of maintaining the setups through massive and
prolonged usage is often a bottleneck in upholding the quality of training that the laboratory
course aspires to impart. As of today little can be done to circumvent the requirement to use
commercially available radiation detectors, however, it is possible to dispense with, the
conventional pulse processing systems, atleast for the basic laboratory level courses, by
taking recourse to the contemporary digital signal processing methodology, as would be
detailed during the presentation. The methodology utilizes the open source resources for
pulse processing as well as the data acquisition. With this approach, the basic representations
of nuclear phenomena, such as spectrum of a radioactive source, can be efficiently
accomplished for an illustrative training of the students.
The experience in dabbling with the DSP algorithms has paved way for the Nuclear Physics
Group at the Kolkata Centre of the Consortium in the developmental endeavours associated
with the digital signal processing and data acquisition, in the vibrant domain of in-beam
gamma ray spectroscopy, being actively pursued using the Indian National Gamma Array.
One of the recent implementations of such a system has been in a campaign of the Indian
National Gamma Array (INGA) hosted at the Room Temperature Cyclotron (RTC) of the
Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC), Kolkata. The system befits spectroscopic
applications, working under a Compton suppressed detector multiplicity based event trigger
as well as under condition effecting to a triggerless mode. These developments intend to
befriend the user in his quest to probe the nuclear excitations. The odyssey embarks with the
generation of the pulses from the detector, following a detection, and wades through
processing of the pulse to extract the knowledge within and come up with a representation
that embodies the acquired data in a format which can be flexibly accessed at different stages
of the continued pursuit.
The Nuclear Physics Group at the UGC-DAE CSR, associated with the development of the
digital daq, has members, Dr. R. Raut, Dr. S.S. Ghugre, Dr. A.K. Sinha, Mr. S. Das, Mr. S.
Samanta, Mr. S. Chatterjee and Mr. K. Basu. Dr. H. Tan of XIA LLC (USA) has led the
fabrication of the daq system at the manufacturing end. The development of an open source
counting system was a collaborative endeavour with Prof Amitava Gupta and Shri A Jana
from, the School of Nuclear Studies & Applications, Jadavpur University.
