The data acquisition system of the neutron time-of-flight facility n_TOF at CERN

The n_TOF facility at CERN has been designed for the measurement of neutron capture, fission and (n,×n) cross-sections with high accuracy. This requires a flexible and-due to the high instantaneous neutron flux-almost dead time free data acquisition system. A scalable and versatile data solution has been designed based on 8-bit flash-ADCs with sampling rates up to 2 GHz and 8 Mbyte memory buffer. The software is written in C and C++ and is running on PCs equipped with RedHat Linux.