Development of an Advanced RF Level Converter for SpinQuest's Trigger and Data Acquisition System

The SpinQuest experiment at Fermilab aims to conduct the first Sivers function measurement on sea quarks using the Drell-Yan process, which may shed light on the contribution of orbital angular momentum from light antiquarks to the proton. This is achieved by detecting pairs of positive and negative muons from Drell-Yan production on polarized nucleon targets using the SpinQuest spectrometer. Efficient separation of these events from the substantial muon background originating from the beam dump necessitates a highly efficient FPGA (field-programmable gate array) trigger system.

The three-level trigger system utilizes a 52.8 MHz analog RF signal from the Fermilab Main Injector as a clock input, with clock stability being crucial for both the performance of the trigger hardware and the overall data quality. This work presents a prototype of a new printed circuit board (PCB) for RF signal conversion, developed using standard industrial components. Additionally, the challenges encountered during the prototyping phase will be discussed.