The Electronics and Data Acquisition System of the DarkSide Dark Matter Search

This paper reports on the electronics and data acquisition system of a dark matter (DM) search using a 50 kg dual-phase, liquid argon time projection chamber (TPC) which was embedded in water and liquid scintillator veto detectors (DS-50). If DM is a subatomic particle, a possible candidate is a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), and the DS-50 experiment is a direct search for evidence of WIMP-nuclear collisions at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS). The light from nuclear excitation in the TPC as a result of a WIMP-Nuclear collision, is collected by 38 photomultiplier tubes (PMT) positioned on the top and bottom of the cylindrical TPC cryostat. The two veto detectors, instrumented with PMT, shield the TPC and tag background events due to cosmogneic and local radioactivity. All PMT signals from both the TPC and Veto systems are digitized and their waveforms transferred in parallel to event building computers running the ARTDAQ software developed at the Fermi National Laboratory (FNAL). This paper describes the system triggers, the synchronization of the data flows, and the event building for both the TPC and Veto.