Design and Validation of the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment Data Acquisition System

The Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE) is a proposed neutrino detector that will be in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Canada with the goal of studying astrophysical neutrinos. Directional reconstruction is crucial in determining the origins of these events, and P-ONE is being designed with the goal of achieving resolution at or below a tenth of a degree for track events. This resolution is 4x better than the current pointing resolution for similar events achieved by IceCube, a neutrino observatory at the South Pole. The key elements to P-ONE's design that allow such an improved angular resolution include the underwater environment, strict timing requirements between detection modules, and the components of the detector itself. Each detection module will consist of 16 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs), an analog to digital converter (ADC), an FPGA to process data, and a series of environmental sensors. Two independent timing systems will provide high precision clocks to all modules. P-ONE will also include calibration modules that feature an LED flasher. In this work, we present the design and preliminary results of a test of the mainboard, ADC, PMTs, and flasher. The goals of this test are to develop a pulse library to be used in software development, test pulse time reconstruction, and verify time synchronization between the flasher and the data acquisition system. The results of this test will aid in the development of data acquisition software and assist in determining the optimal gain setting of the PMTs.