A triggerless digital data acquisition system for nuclear decay experiments

In nuclear decay experiments an important goal of the Data Acquisition (DAQ) system is to allow the reconstruction of time correlations between signals registered in different detectors. Classically DAQ systems are based in a trigger that starts the event acquisition, and all data related with the event of that trigger are collected as one compact structure. New technologies and electronics developments offer new possibilities to nuclear experiments with the use of sampling ADC-s. This type of ADC-s is able to provide the pulse shape, height and a time stamp of the signal. This new feature (time stamp) allows new systems to run without an event trigger. Later, the event can be reconstructed using the time stamp information. In this work we present a new DAQ developed for β-delayed neutron emission experiments. Due to the long moderation time of neutrons, we opted for a self-trigger DAQ based on commercial digitizers. With this DAQ a negligible acquisition dead time was achieved while keeping a maximum of event information and flexibility in time correlations.