Development Of The Control And Data Acquisition Software Of The GEM-TPC Fast Neutron Spectrometer

Neutron energy spectrum measurement has been occupies an important position in the development of nuclear physics,which is a basic content in the field of radiation detection. To meet the increasing requirement of energy resolution and detection efficiency in fast neutron spectrum measurement in recent years, tsinghua university has developed a fast neutron energy spectrum measurement system based on the GEM-TPC.GEM-TPC is a new type of detector which use the Time Projector Chamber as detector probe ontology and Gas Electron Multiplier as detector readout,which can measure the neutron energy spectrum based on the nuclear recoil method. Its prototype detection system and the relevant aspects is now in design.Therefore,we need a complete set-of control and data acquisition (hereinafter referred to as CDAQ) to march the detector system, which can control the detector measurement accurately in the development and debugging phase, and can do a real-time feedback to the detector’s output signal waveform characteristics and the change of the statistical information in different conditions(such as different ratio of gases and different GEM film layer and the bias voltage, etc.), thus obtains the detector’s best work parameters and degradation curve of the performance(mainly the energy resolution and detection efficiency) under different parameters.This thesis mainly completed the development of the CDAQ system’s PC control and acquisition software(PC software, hereinafter referred to as PCS).PCS can configure real-time working parameters (such as trigger threshold) and do work mode choice to CDAQ system,and can send instruction to realize CDAQ system’s self-check, and can display the output waveforms of the GEM-TPC detector’s 720 channels in real-time,which can monitor the detector’s working status and electronics performance of each output channel.Finally,the detector output waveform information can be saved as TXT, XLS, binary code and other format files to facilitate different software’s analysis and processing. They can quickly extract the time and location information needed for reconstruction of recoil three-dimensional track, and calculate the incident neutron energy according to energy of recoil nuclear.Finally, by the test in heavy ion accelerator at Peking University, we examined the effects of the PCS’s work performance with CDAQ and detector.Test results show that the software can effectively control the detector and the CDAQ work under different parameters,and can adapt to different energy, strength and the rate of average time’s measurement requirements of proton beams.From PCS record we can reconstruct the proton’s three-dimensional track accurately,which can offer important support to optimize the GEM-TPC performance constantly and finally achieve high resolution, high efficiency of neutron energy spectrum measurement.