Minutes of the BEAST meeting
Friday June 19th 12:00 JST

A Web Page with many photographs of BEAST prototypes and other useful information is available at:
http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/~beast

DAQ:
The Australians discussed the BEAST DAQ. Their initial plan is to adapt a system used for data taking at TRIUMF beam tests. The system which runs on a LINUX PC should be able to handle rates up to 300 Hz. The system will be debugged at Melbourne and then moved to KEK in September. One question not yet settled is which type of CAMAC/PC interface cards are needed. It is possible that CAMAC/GPIB board could work. Or it may be Kinetic systems CAMAC/PC 2927 or 2915 module will be necessary to handle high rates. The accelerator information will be available by the VME network shared memory. Leon will discuss with Sakai-san how to access this information.
Initially at low accelerator luminosity, the BPM will provide a trigger. As the luminosity improves, a discriminated sum of drift tube signals will provide a trigger.
Sahu provided another summary of the channel count. There are about 100 DC levels, 20 ADC pulses to be digitized. There are 24 DC levels from diodes, 20 RTD levels from temperature measurements in diodes and on the beampipe. There are 53 DC levels from the drift tubes and 7 pulses to be digitized. There are 20 MOSFETs for active dose monitoring. For the moment, we assume that the CsI(Tl) and EFC crystals will be read out independently and if necessary correlated with accelerator information. The SVD group will take care of the readout of the SVD quadrant in the electronics hut.
A module inventory is needed fairly soon. An initial guess is that an additional 4 scalars, 3 Octal discriminators, 1 trigger register, and 4 2249 ADCs are needed. A Datway Display is also needed for DAQ. The Australian group will need a subset of these modules for their DAQ tests.

Drift tubes:
All the PCB boards and electronic components for drift tube readout have arrived. The boards are being populated.

Diodes:
The diode signals were found to be too small in the radiation damage tests. This is due to the small active area 0.5 cm x 0.5 cm and the small depletion depths of O(50-70) mu m of the Hamamatsu diode model. Better Hamamatsu diodes (model S 2744-08) with larger active areas and 300 mum depletion depths will be used instead. A batch of 30 of these were obtained from Tamai-san and then sent to Hawaii. No changes to the readout electronics are required in order to use these diodes although the box and holders have to be modified.
The second PCB readout prototype arrives tommorow.

MOSFETs:
The MOSFETs are located on the inner layer of the BEAST next to the diodes and on the front face of the CsI(Tl) crystals. About 20 are needed for BEAST. There are 32 which have been calibrated as a function of radiation dose in Australia. These will be sent to Hawaii and attached to the mechanical structure.

Structure:
Rosen presented updated drawings of the BEAST structure. The CsI(Tl) supports and outer beast ring will be made from fiberglass unistrut. Non-magnetic materials (delrin, fiberglass, composites) will be used wherever possible. One of the backward endcap crystals may need to be moved or removed to satisfy the space constraints of the concrete shield. The inner BEAST support structure was narrowed to allow personnel access.
The support for the beampipe is not yet decided. One possibility is to use the same support structure ("bed") that supports the inner layer of BEAST. Details of this still have to be worked out. Rosen also discussed positioning mounts for BEAST and the beampipe.

Simulation:
Rodriguez reported an update on the simulation of standalone BEAST. He is now generating single tracks and simulating their interactions.
Bozek presented results on the z and phi distributions of backgrounds. He noted that the background properties versus z and phi are significantly different without the solenoidal detector field.