LHCb Calorimeters High Voltage System

The calorimeter system in LHCb aims to identify electrons, photons and hadrons. All calorimeters are equipped with Hamamatsu photo tubes as devices for light to signal conversion. Eight thousand R7899-20 tubes are used for electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters and two hundred 64 channels multi-anode R7600-00-M64 for Scintillator-Pad/Preshower detectors. The calorimeter high voltage (HV) system is based on a Cockroft Walton (CW) voltage converter and a control board connected to the Experiment Control System (ECS) by serial bus. The base of each photomultiplier tube (PMT) is built with a high voltage converter and constructed on an individual printed circuit board, using compact surface mount components. The base is attached directly to the PMT. There are no HV cables in the system. A Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is used on the control board as an interface between the ECS and the 200 control channels. The FPGA includes also additional functionalities allowing automated monitoring and ramp up of the high voltage values. This paper describes the HV system architecture, some technical details of the electronics implementation and summarizes the system performance. This safe and low power consumption HV electronic system for the photomultiplier tubes can be used for various biomedical apparatus too