A Reconfigurable Instrument System for Nuclear and Particle Physics Experiments

We developed a reconfigurable nuclear instrument system (RNIS) that could satisfy the requirements of diverse nuclear and particle physics experiments, and the inertial confine- ment fusion diagnostic. Benefiting from the reconfigurable hardware structure and digital pulse processing technology, RNIS shakes off the restrictions of cumbersome crates and miscellaneous modules. It retains all the advantages of conventional nuclear instruments and is more flexible and portable. RNIS is primarily composed of a field programmable hardware board and relevant PC software. Separate analog channels are designed to provide different functions, such as am- plifiers, ADC, fast discriminators and Schmitt discriminators for diverse experimental purposes. The high-performance field programmable gate array could complete high-precision time interval measurement, histogram accumulation, counting, and coincidence anticoincidence measurement. To illustrate the prospects of RNIS, a series of applications to the experiments are described in this paper. The first, for which RNIS was originally developed, involves nuclear energy spectrum mea- surement with a scintillation detector and photomultiplier. The second experiment applies RNIS to a G-M tube counting experiment, and in the third, it is applied to a quantum communication experiment through reconfiguration.