Timing and Fast Control (TFC) for the CBM experiment

Project goals

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment will be one of the scientific pillars of the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt. The experiment aims to expand our knowledge about the properties of the matter at extremely high densities, similar to those found in cores of neutron stars and neutron star mergers. To test the existing theories and potentially discover new particle decays or phase transitions, the experiment works with particle collisions at the unprecedented peak interaction rate of 10 MHz and analyses the results of collisions by fully reconstructing them from measurements in real time. To achieve the goal, all the measurements must be precisely timestamped and safely transferred to the computing farm, where event reconstruction and online analysis takes place.

ITIV participation

Recording the short-lived particle collisions is comparable to taking a picture with a camera. It is important that millions of pixels are recorded at exactly the same time. As part of a large international collaboration, ITIV develops a central Timing and Fast Control (TFC) system for the CBM experiment. To ensure that all detectors in the CBM experiment work as a single measurement system, the TFC system orchestrates the data acquisition and ensures that millions of collisions per second are recorded synchronously by the CBM detectors. Exact overview of the time and load monitoring is critical in order to protect the data readout from congestion and data loss.