Waveform digitizing at 500 MHz

A description is given of Experiment E787 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is designated to study the decay K⁺→π+vv to a sensitivity of 2×10^-10. The authors report on the design and construction of over 200 channels of relatively low-cost solid-state waveform digitizers. These transient digitizers are capable of detecting the decay π →μv_{ev v} with 75% efficiency and of rejecting μ _evv decays to a level of 10^-4. The distinguishing features of the digitizers are 8-bit dynamic range, 500-MHz sampling, zero suppression on the fly, deep memory (up to 0.5 ms), and fast readout time (100 μs for the entire system). Data obtained during the February-May 1988 run are reported