Upgrade of ASACUSA's antihydrogen detector

The goal of the ASACUSA (Atomic Spectroscopy And Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons) CUSP experiment at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator is to measure the ground state hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen in order to test whether CPT invariance is broken.The ASACUSA hodoscope is a detector consisting of two layers of 32 plastic scintillator bars individually read out by two serially connected silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) on each end. Two additional layers for position resolution along the beam axis were scintillator fibres, which will now be replaced by scintillating tiles placed onto the existing bars and also read out by SiPMs. If the antiproton of antihydrogen annihilates in the centre of the hodoscope, particles (mostly pions) are produced and travel through the various layers of the detector and produce signals.The hodoscope was successfully used during the last data taking period at CERN. The necessary time resolution to discriminate between particles travelling through the detector from outside and particles produced in the centre of the detector was achieved by the use of waveform digitisers and software constant fraction discrimination. The disadvantage of this readout scheme was the slow readout speed, which was improved by two orders of magnitude. This was done by omitting the digitisers and replacing them with TDCs reading out the digital time-over-threshold (ToT) signal using leading edge discrimination.

Automated summary

The ASACUSA experiment aims to measure the ground state hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen to test CPT invariance. The hodoscope, consisting of scintillator bars and fibres, was successfully used with waveform digitizers for time resolution. However, the slow readout speed was improved by replacing the digitizers with TDCs reading out the ToT signal.