# Nuclear Science and Techniques

《核技术》(英文版) ISSN 1001-8042 CN 31-1559/TL     2019 Impact factor 1.556

Nuclear Science and Techniques ›› 2016, Vol. 27 ›› Issue (6): 135

• NUCLEAR ELECTRONICS AND INSTRUMENTATION •

### Readout electronics of a prototype spectrometer for measuring low-energy ions in solar wind plasma

Di Yang 1,2, Zhe Cao 1,2, Xi Qin2, Xin-Jun Hao3,4, Shu-Bin Liu1,2, Chang-Qing Feng1,2,Qi An1,2

1. 1 State Key Laboratory of Particle Detection and Electronics (IHEP-USTC), Hefei 230026, China
2 Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
3 Division of Space Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
4 CAS Key Laboratory of Geospace Environment, Hefei 230026, China
• Contact: Chang-Qing Feng E-mail:fengcq@ustc.edu.cn
• Supported by:

This work was supported by the National Key Scientific Instrument and Equipment Development Projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41327802) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (WK2030040066).

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Di Yang, Zhe Cao, Xi Qin, Xin-Jun Hao, Shu-Bin Liu, Chang-Qing Feng, Qi An. Readout electronics of a prototype spectrometer for measuring low-energy ions in solar wind plasma.Nuclear Science and Techniques, 2016, 27(6): 135
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Abstract:

Readout electronics is developed for a prototype spectrometer for in situ measurement of low-energy ions of 30 eV/e–20 keV/e in the solar wind plasma. A low-noise preamplifier/discriminator (A111F) is employed for each channel to process the signal from micro-channel plate (MCP) detectors. A high-voltage (HV) supply solution based on a HV module and a HV optocoupler is adopted to generate a fast sweeping HV and a fixed HV. Due to limitation of telemetry bandwidth in space communication, an algorithm is implemented in an FPGA (field programmable gate array) to compress the raw data. Test results show that the electronics achieves a 1 MHz event rate and a large input dynamic range of 95 pC. A slew rate of 0.8 V/μs and an integral nonlinearity of 0.7-LSB for the sweeping HV, and a precision of less than 0.8 % for the fixed HV are obtained. A vacuum beam test shows an energy resolution of 12 ± 0.7 % full width at half maximum (FWHM) is achieved, and noise counts are less than 10/sec, indicating that the performance meets the physical requirement.