Signal Processing and Data Acquisition for the UNM Fission Spectrometer to Measure Binary Fission Product Mass, Energy, Velocity, Atomic Number, and Gamma Rays, Correlated Particle-By-Particle

Fission products contain a wealth of information on the fission process, but typically one dimensional data is extracted, such as a mass or energy distribution. Highly correlated data is valuable for better understanding of the fission process, and is in demand for fission theory. Correlated fission data sets were taken on the University of New Mexico (UNM) Fission Spectrometer using dedicated detectors, analog electronics, and digital data acquisition. Timing module detectors and an axial ionization chamber made for the spectrometer were employed to provide the raw signal pulses. Analog signal processing treated the detector signals and performed fast time comparisons to extract product time of flight and ionization chamber drift time. These signals, combined with the anode and gamma ray detector signals, were put through the digitizer, and pulse heights and time stamps were recorded. This allowed us to set coincidence windows for combining the data into event packets corresponding to individual fission products. From the coincidence events we are able to extract velocity, kinetic energy, mass, information on atomic number, and coincident gamma rays, particle-by-particle from ejected fission products.