TH-PHD-2013-003

Particle physicists have successfully unveiled the fundamental structure of matter with quarks and leptons as elementary constituents. However, it still remains to be explained, how protons and neutrons, the building blocks of atomic nuclei, gain their mass from the interaction between their almost mass-less constituents. An elucidating answer to this problem can be obtained by studying composite systems (in particular “mesons”) containing a heavy “charm” quark or by demonstrating a predicted new exotic type of composite systems with yet unobserved quark combinations. Such systems can be produced in proton-antiproton collisions at the accelerator-complex FAIR in Germany, presently under construction. The particles produced in such powerful collisions will be examined by novel state-of-the-art detection systems. Since the probability to produce rare charm-meson states or even exotic systems is very low, the proton-antiproton collisions need to be performed at extremely high rates. Consequently, subsequent detector signals may overlap which would lead to a dramatic loss of vital information. Instead of well-proven conventional detector-readout systems, we have developed a novel “free-streaming” data readout with “online” event selection and recovery of overlapping signals. The new method was successfully applied in accelerator experiments. We have demonstrated that simple yet powerful algorithms can be developed for the “online” event selection during data transport. The implementation of the studied method in a novel large-scale readout system will allow operating the detector at high collision rates such that a large amount of data can be reliably and precisely processed and rare events can be discovered with high efficiency.