The “Heavy Flavor Tracker” (HFT) is an approved micro-vertex detector upgrade to the STAR experiment at RHIC, consisting of three subsystems with various technologies of silicon sensors arranged in 4 concentric cylinders, to be installed in STAR by 2014. This new vertex detector will improve the track-pointing resolution in STAR to a distance of closest approach (DCA) of ~ 30 μm in order to allow for a direct and full topological reconstruction of heavy quark meson decays and a better determination of the heavy quark meson spectra. The two innermost layers of the HFT close to the beam pipe, the Pixel (“PXL”) subsystem, employ CMOS monolithic active pixel sensor (MAPS) technology that integrates the sensor, front-end electronics, and zero-suppression circuitry in one silicon wafer. The PXL layers of the HFT will consist of 400 MAPS sensors arranged in 40 ladders (10 ladders at a radius of 2.5 cm and 30 ladders at 8 cm from the beam), each containing 10 of these sensors. This paper will present selected design characteristics of the PXL detector part of the HFT and the hardware and firmware architecture of the proposed readout system for this detector, as well as its integration into the existing STAR framework. A prototype of this readout system has recently been used at CERN to take data from a telescope consisting of 7 sensors arranged in parallel planes and shown to be fully functional.

Readout hardware and firmware architecture of the HFT PXL detector at STAR

Hardware controls for the STAR experiment at RHIC

The STAR (Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC) experiment located at Brookhaven National Laboratory has been studying relativistic heavy ion collisions since it began operation in the summer of 2000. An EPICS-based hardware controls system monitors the detector's 25000 operating parameters. The system uses VME processors to communicate with sub-system based sensors over a variety of field busses, with High-level Data Link Control (HDLC) being the most prevalent. Other features of the system include interfaces to accelerator and magnet control systems, a web-based archiver, and C++ based communication between STAR online, run control and hardware controls and their associated databases. Planned revisions to the system involve moving I/O controllers from VxWorks to RTEMS; transferring user displays from Sun Workstations to PC's and replacing aging VME processors with PC's. Experience with the existing system as well as upgrade plans are discussed. Proposals for the integration of upgrade detectors are outlined.

The star slow controls system - status and upgrade plans

We report our experience on migrating STARs Online Services (Run Control System, Data Acquisition System, Slow Control System and Subsystem Monitoring) from direct read/write database accesses to a modern non-blocking message-oriented infrastructure. Based on the Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and standards, this novel approach does not specify the message data structure, allowing great flexibility in its use. After careful consideration, we chose Google Protocol Buffers as our primary (de)serialization format for structured data exchange. This migration allows us to reduce the overall system complexity and greatly improve the reliability of the metadata collection and the performance of our online services in general. We will present this new framework through its software architecture overview, providing details about our staged and non-disruptive migration process as well as details of the implementation of pluggable components to provide future improvements without compromising stability and availability of services.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/331/2/022003/pdf

A message-queuing framework for STAR's online monitoring and metadata collection

The STAR experiment has been delivering significant physics results for more than 20 years. Stable operation of the experiment was achieved by using a robust controls system based on the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS). Now an object-oriented approach with Python libraries, adapted for EPICS software, is going to replace the procedural-based EPICS C libraries previously used at STAR. Advantages of the new approach include stability of operation, code reduction and straightforward project documentation. The first two sections of this paper introduce the STAR experiment, give an overview of the EPICS architecture, and present the use of Python for controls software. Specific examples, as well as upgrades of user interfaces, are outlined in the following sections.

Upgrade of hardware controls for the STAR experiment at RHIC

The STAR detector sits in a high radiation area when operating normally; therefore it was necessary to develop a robust system to remotely control all hardware. The STAR hardware controls system monitors and controls approximately 14,000 parameters in the STAR detector. Voltages, currents, temperatures, and other parameters are monitored. Effort has been minimized by the adoption of experiment-wide standards and the use of pre-packaged software tools. The system is based on the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) [1] . VME processors communicate with subsystem-based sensors over a variety of field busses, with High-level Data Link Control (HDLC) being the most prevalent. Other features of the system include interfaces to accelerator and magnet control systems, a web-based archiver, and C++-based communication between STAR online, run control and hardware controls and their associated databases. The system has been designed for easy expansion as new detector elements are installed in STAR.

pdf/hardware-controls-for-the-star-experiment-at-rhic-lq7sihmsjd.pdf

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Hardware controls for the STAR experiment at RHIC