Red Pitaya Blog

DIY muon telescope: Homemade innovation for secondary cosmic ray detection with synchronized data acquisition

Written by Red Pitaya Team | Apr 9, 2024 8:37:28 AM

This project centers on a DIY telescope designed to detect muons from secondary cosmic rays. It features two plastic scintillator tiles with optical fibers linked to silicon photomultipliers, mounted on a servomechanism for orientation adjustments and triggering a gaseous detector. The electronics consist of slow control components for SiPM biasing and timestamping using a CERN Cosmic Pi main board with GPS, Raspberry Pi 0, and microcontroller-based boards. Fast control electronics involve a Red Pitaya board for data acquisition, signal conditioning, and a broadband amplifier. A homemade gaseous detector with a photodiode readout is synchronized with the scintillator readout through connections to an Arduino Due and the Red Pitaya board, facilitating simultaneous data acquisition.

Find the whole project here.