Upgrading the Front-End Card of the ALICE/CERN Photon Spectrometer Experiment

The design of the upgraded front-end card (FEC) of the ALICE/CERN Photon Spectrometer experiment is described. The development of the new FEC is associated with an increase in the luminosity and energy of the Large Hadron Collider beams and with the need to increase the accuracy of time-of-flight measurements for the better identification of detected particles. The available FEC of the photon spectrometer does not meet the new requirements and must be replaced according to the upgrading plan. The improvement of FEC measurement performance is achieved through hardware-based measurement of the flight time instead of offline processing of photodetector waveform digitization codes. The upgraded FEC contains 32 measuring channels and all functional modules necessary for the photon spectrometer operation. The functional modules are described. The characteristics of the upgraded FEC have been measured on the PS/SPS test beams at CERN in the momentum range of 1−150 GeV/c. Based on these results, it is concluded that the developed card fully complies with the requirements for the FEC of the upgraded photon spectrometer.