Design of Prototype Front-end Digital Module for Direct Dark Matter Detection based on LAr

Abstract

Liquid argon (LAr) with a high light yield of approximately 40 photons per keV is an attractive target for the direct detection of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which are well motivated galactic dark matter candidates. We studies a front-end electronics design for a LAr dark matter detector with the scintillation read out by PMT, which has an input dynamic range from 5pC to 1nC, and high resolution that single photoelectron can be distinguished. In this paper, we present the design of front-end digital module (FDM) which is the important portion of electronics. The prototype FDM is equipped with 14-bit 1-GSPS analog-to-digital converters (ADC), and the performance of prototype FDM had been test in lab (e.g. ENOB is 10.40 bits @298 MHz). Moreover, this prototype FDM had been tested with LAr detector collaboratively and test results are also presented.