Nuclear Physics Seminars

The talk presents an overview and status report of the MEG experiment at PSI, Switzerland, which searches for the decay Mu -> e Gamma at the 10^(-13) level. The motivation for the experiment is discussed and compared with other Lepton Flavor Violating processes, such as Mu A -> eA conversion. To accommodate the extremely high demands regarding pile-up suppression, timing resolution, and versatility, a special waveform digitizing technique was designed and implemented in the MEG experiment. It relies on the Domino Ring Sampling chip (DRS), capable of digitizing 8 channels with 5 GHz and 12 bits effective resolution on a single radiation hard CMOS chip. The DRS chip is currently used in the MEG experiment to digitize 2000 drift chamber channels and 1000 photomultiplier channels, eliminating the need for traditional ADCs and TDCs. Techniques used in MEG for waveform processing (e.g., data compression, pulse shape discrimination, and crosstalk elimination) may have applications in other rare decay experiments, and in cosmic ray astronomy.