Proton Calorimetry/Meetings/2025/03/25

Minutes for UCL Proton Beam Therapy Group Meetings, 25th March

Joe Bateman, Sonia Escribano, Matt Warren, Harry Barnett, Simon Jolly, Raffaella Radogna (via Teams)

John willing to come down to help cut sheets on daetron when installed
They have done all the thicknesses just machining the outside
Haven’t sent samples yet because surface finish is a lot better and samples are not reflective on what’s been done on actual sheets but potential for sheets could be varying quality
Estimated date for delivery at end of March

Will be writing a section in the FRIDA Frontiers paper about the scintillating fibre monitor design and preliminary data

Fixed zmod boards arrived
New ddc boards arrived and works
Zmod and ddc board works together
When plugging in 4 ddc with zmod boards and that worked and drawing current of 1A - need to try with new USBC cables
When plugging in 8 getting about 2A
Only get data back from 3 when have 8 plugged in - but could be a cable issue
8 work for digital read back in a chain but 40gig cables don’t work but 10 gig cables do

Nuvia invited us out to Prague on w/b 7/4 or 21/4
Spoke to Czech PTC proton physicist about visiting and possible beam time
Fly on Thursday 24/4 - Friday 25/4 at Nuvia, Saturday 26/4 at PTC
- Bring 4 modules with two boards each module but bring whatever we can
Aim for two consecutive evenings in UCLH at some point in May
- Pristine Bragg peaks
- SOBPs
- Moving the QuARC to check effect of measuring beam off axis
Email from Andy Rose at Imperial for advice on integrated FPGA back-end DAQ such as on-chip KRIA (less CPU than pi5 but more FPGA power than USB104)
- Also was able to re-factor Kelleter equation to optimise for computing to be ~700x faster in C++

Attended PPRIG with Simon on Thursday + Friday last week - interesting discussions on the future of PSQA and what alternatives there are to meet the requirements, as well as discussions on a reference MC simulation or reference physics lists, and ML MC simulations
Kirsty emailed about potential Hamamatsu customisation options
- Hamamatsu engineers do not believe that the S11865-128 can be controlled and read out using the Texas Instruments ADC (e.g. DDC232). This is because the S11865-128 has a voltage output with CMOS.
- The signal of a standard photodiode (such as the S12859 hat you mentioned) can be used with the DDC232. but narrowest pitch of that type they have is is the S15913/S15914 series with 800um pitch but might be able to customise that type to achieve a smaller pitch.
  - Maybe worthwhile buying some of these to test with DDC232 before waiting to see if Hamamatsu can customise a smaller pitch.
Will be discussing with Blake also the possibility of relocating the HIT fibre monitor setup at UCL using their electronics designs and then possibly moving towards integrated and modular approach after that?