Custom Modular Data Acquisition Systems for the BEACON Experiment

The Beamforming Elevated Array for COsmic Neutrinos (BEACON) is a new concept targeting the highest tau energy neutrinos (E > 100 PeV). The design uses a compact antenna array on a high elevation mountain to search for radio emission from upgoing tau leptons produced by tau neutrino interactions in the Earth. A prototype for BEACON – located at White Mountain Research Station in California – consists of 4 custom crossed dipole antennas operating in the 30-80 MHz range that are phased in real-time. A novel, modular data acquisition (DAQ) system is being developed to deploy a BEACON station in remote environments. The new DAQ will support up to 32 science instruments, like antennas, while maintaining a small footprint and drawing minimal power. With this new instrumentation and a full deployment, the detector will provide a measurement of the tau flavor of cosmogenic neutrinos, which could be used to set limits on the observed flavor ratios for cosmogenic neutrinos complimentary to the all-flavor flux measurements from other experiments. In this talk I will give a brief overview of BEACON, the development of the new instrumentation for the full array, and discuss how it will be used in the prototype.