Building a Readout Software for the NOPTREX Experiment

The Neutron Optics Parity and Time Reversal Experiment (NOPTREX) is investigating violations of time-reversal symmetry in the hopes to explain the baryon asymmetry of the early universe. In pursuit of this, members of the NOPTREX collaboration are constructing an array of twenty-four sodium-iodide scintillation gamma detectors to measure n-gamma resonances in heavy nuclei. This system will produce a large amount of data in a matter of milliseconds, necessitating a high-speed data acquisition system to read the output of the detectors and deliver the data in a usable format. A custom firmware for a CAEN digitizer has already been developed that implements a trapezoid filter and charge integration to ensure the energy of each pulse is recorded. But, the firmware is limited by the basic readout software provided with the digitizer and cannot generate the required file output. We have developed custom readout software in C++ that reads out data from the digitizer firmware and analyzes it in real time before recording it to a file in the ROOT format to take advantage of the high-performance computing software developed at CERN.