학술논문

The Level 2 Trigger of the H.E.S.S. 28 Meter Cherenkov Telescope
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on. 58(4):1685-1691 Aug, 2011
Subject
Nuclear Engineering
Bioengineering
Iron
Pixel
Cameras
Telescopes
Hardware
Field programmable gate arrays
Software
FPGA
hardware acceleration
real time systems
system on chip
topological trigger
Language
ISSN
0018-9499
1558-1578
Abstract
The High-energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) is an array of atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes dedicated to GeV-TeV $\gamma$ ray astronomy. Four 12 meter diameter telescopes (CT) are currently in operation and a fifth 28 meter diameter telescope (LCT) should be completed by 2011. This will lower the system's energy threshold in stereoscopy down to $\approx$ 50 GeV. Concurrently, the LCT will also be used to detect monoscopic lower energy showers without a coincident detection on the smaller telescopes. This is made possible thanks to the higher sensitivity and the faster electronics of the LCT. But lowering the L1 trigger conditions on the LCT results in a larger number of spurious background detections the reduction of which motivates the second level trigger system of the LCT. An efficient L2 selection algorithm was designed based on intensive off line simulations of air shower images from different background events and their morphological differences as seen by the LCT. The present contribution reports on the flexible and reconfigurable hardware solution designed for the L2 trigger, and on the real-time implementation of the proposed L2 algorithm.