Take is slow: monitoring at DESY
Barbara Warmbein, 04/10/2017

DESY researcher Mengqing Wu developed the slow control (Image: DESY)

As part of the AIDA-2020 project’s Work Package 15 (WP15), which aims to upgrade beam and irradiation test infrastructures across Europe, the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany has developed a new infrastructure.

DESY offers its test beam capabilities to users across Europe under the AIDA-2020 project’s Transnational Access scheme. Users of the infrastructure can now profit from a new feature:  a generic multi-use “slow control” monitoring system.

The system monitors the environment of the test beam, from ambient temperature and pressure to the strength of the surrounding magnetic fields. As it is quite versatile, integrating additional sensors, like for gas flow and pressure, or currents and voltages, is very straightforward. 

Knowing all these factors can be very useful when testing new equipment as they may help explain effects in detector prototypes and setups that might be left unexplained otherwise. Up to now, users had to develop their own monitoring systems. With this new system, users can focus their work on testing their new technologies and detectors, as the monitoring is already been taken care of by the AIDA-2020 infrastructure.

Two of these systems have already been installed at DESY and are accessible to all users. The output data generated through the use of the system is being integrated into the EUDAQ2 data acquisition software’s data stream.

Since there is always more than one way to do it, users can also access the slow control monitoring database directly if needed.