MIDAS is a data acquisition package developed at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland, and

TRIUMF TRIUMF is Canada's national particle accelerator centre. It is considered Canada's premier physics laboratory, and consistently regarded as one of the world's leading subatomic physics research centers. Owned and operated by a consortium of uni ...

, Canada. It was designed for particle detectors using CAMAC and

VMEbus VMEbus (Versa Module Europa or Versa Module Eurocard bus) is a computer bus standard, originally developed for the Motorola 68000 line of CPUs, but later widely used for many applications and standardized by the IEC as ANSI/IEEE 1014-1987. I ...

hardware.

Description

MIDAS (Maximum Integration Data Acquisition System) has been developed as a general purpose data acquisition system for small and medium scale experiments originally by Stefan Ritt in 1993, followed by Pierre-André Amaudruz in 1996. It is written in C and published under the

GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

. The experiment complexity ranges from test systems, where a single PC is connected to CAMAC via a PC-CAMAC interface, to experiments with several front-end computers and analysis nodes. The system currently runs under

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

, various versions of UNIX,

VMS #REDIRECT VMS {{redirect category shell, {{R from other capitalisation{{R from ambiguous page ...

VxWorks VxWorks is a real-time operating system (or RTOS) developed as proprietary software by Wind River Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Aptiv. First released in 1987, VxWorks is designed for use in embedded systems requiring real-time, determin ...

and

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

and can be ported easily to virtually any operating system which supports TCP/IP sockets. A speed-optimized RPC layer is used for data exchange, with which sustained data rates of 980 kB/s (

10BASE-T 1 (one, unit, unity) is a number representing a single or the only entity. 1 is also a numerical digit and represents a single unit of counting or measurement. For example, a line segment of ''unit length'' is a line segment of length 1. I ...

), 8.7 MB/s (

100BASE-TX In computer networking, Fast Ethernet physical layers carry traffic at the nominal rate of 100 Mbit/s. The prior Ethernet speed was 10 Mbit/s. Of the Fast Ethernet physical layers, 100BASE-TX is by far the most common. Fast Ethern ...

) and up to 98 MB/s (

1000BASE-T In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use i ...

). An integrated slow control system contains a fast online database and a history system. Drivers exist for CAMAC, VME, Fastbus, High Voltage Crates, GBIB and several PC plug-in DAQ boards. A framework is supplied which can be extended by user code for front-end readout on one side and data analysis on the other side. The online data can be presented by PAW as histograms and N-tuples as well as by

ROOT In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the sur ...

. A dedicated HTTP server gives fast Web access for experiment control and to access the slow control system including a graphical representation of variable trends (history display).

Usage of MIDAS

MIDAS is used in many experiments in nuclear and particle physics. Following list shows a few of them: *

Mu to E Gamma The Mu to E Gamma (MEG) is a particle physics experiment dedicated to measuring the decay of the muon into an electron and a photon, a decay mode which is heavily suppressed in the Standard Model by lepton flavour conservation, but enhanced in ...

experiment at

PSI Psi, PSI or Ψ may refer to: Alphabetic letters * Psi (Greek) (Ψ, ψ), the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet * Psi (Cyrillic) (Ѱ, ѱ), letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet, adopted from Greek Arts and entertainment * "Psi" as an abbreviation ...

* Mu3e experiment at PSI * Laboratory for Muon Spin Spectroscopy at PSI * TWIST experiment at

* Various ISAC experiments at TRIUMF *

T2K experiment T2K ("Tokai to Kamioka") is a particle physics experiment studying the oscillations of the accelerator neutrinos. The experiment is conducted in Japan by the international cooperation of about 500 physicists and engineers with over 60 research insti ...

in Japan * DEAP-3600 experiment at SNOLAB * Muon g-2 experiment at

Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been operat ...

ASACUSA Atomic Spectroscopy and Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons (ASACUSA), AD-3, is an experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator, Antiproton Decelerator (AD) at CERN. The experiment was proposed in 1997, started collecting data in 2002 by using the anti ...

experiment at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

ALPHA experiment The Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA), also known as AD-5, is an experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator at CERN, designed to trap neutral antihydrogen in a magnetic trap, and conduct experiments on them. The ultimate goal of this ...

References

{{reflist

External links

MIDAS home page at TRIUMF, Canada
Physics software