An ultra-fast digitizer with picosecond sampling time for Coherent Synchrotron Radiation

Since a few years Coherent Synchrotron Radiation (CSR) generated by short electron bunches is provided at the ANKA synchrotron light source. To study the THz emission characteristics over multiple revolutions superconducting YBa₂Cu₃O_7-δ (YBCO) thin-film detectors can be used. The intrinsic response time of YBCO thin films is in the order of a few picoseconds only. For fast and continuous sampling of this individual ultra-short terahertz pulses a novel digitizer system has been developed with programmable sampling times in the range of 3 to 100 ps. The Real-time system is based on a heterogeneous FPGA and GPU architecture for on-line pulse reconstruction and evaluations of the peak amplitudes and the time between consecutive bunches. The data is transmitted to a GPU computing node by a fast data transfer link based on a bus master DMA engine connected to PCI express endpoint logic. This new DMA architecture ensures a continuous high data throughput of up to 4 GByte/s. The presented DAQ system is able to resolve the bursting behavior of single bunches even in a multi-bunch environment and to study the bunch-bunch-interactions.