A Trigger Interface Board to manage trigger and timing signals in CTA Large-Sized Telescope and Medium-Sized Telescope cameras

TL;DR

This paper presents a Trigger Interface Board (TIB) designed to manage trigger signals, timing, and event timestamping for CTA telescopes, enhancing background suppression and synchronization across different telescope types.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel Trigger Interface Board (TIB) that manages trigger signals, timing, and event timestamps for CTA telescopes, improving coordination and background reduction.

Findings

Effective trigger management for LSTs and MSTs

Accurate event timestamping with White Rabbit protocol

Improved synchronization and dead-time monitoring

Abstract

One of the main goals of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) observatory is to improve the $\gamma$-ray detection sensitivity by an order of magnitude, compared to the current ground-based observatories. Widening the energy coverage down to 20 GeV and up to 300 TeV is also an important goal. This goal will be possible by using Large-Sized Telescopes (LSTs) for the energy range of 20--200 GeV, Medium-Sized Telescopes (MSTs) for 100 GeV--10 TeV, and Small-Sized Telescopes (SSTs) for energies above 5 TeV. The LSTs, which focus on the lowest energies, are operated in a region dominated by background events originated from the night sky background. To reduce such background events as much as possible, the LST cameras are only read out if at least two of them have been triggered in a short-time coincidence window. Such trigger is implemented for each LST camera in a dedicated module called Trigger Interface Board (TIB). In addition, the TIB is also used in MSTs equipped with the NectarCAM camera system to manage the different trigger and timing signals between LSTs and MSTs, as well as to monitor the different counting rates and dead-time of the cameras. It also assigns a time stamp to each event, which is recorded along with the information provided by the CTA global timing distribution system, based on the White Rabbit protocol. Therefore, the event arrival time can be determined in a redundant way. In this contribution, the main features and the technical performance of the TIB are presented.