Waveform digitizing at 500 MHz

A description is given of Experiment E787 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is designated to study the decay K/sup +/ to pi +vv to a sensitivity of 2*10/sup -10/. The authors report on the design and construction of over 200 channels of relatively low-cost solid-state waveform digitizers. These transient digitizers are capable of detecting the decay pi to mu v/sub /e/sub /v/sub /v with 75% efficiency and of rejecting mu /sub /e/sub /v/sub /v decays to a level of 10/sup -4/. The distinguishing features of the digitizers are 8-bit dynamic range, 500-MHz sampling, zero suppression on the fly, deep memory (up to 0.5 ms), and fast readout time (100 mu s for the entire system). Data obtained during the February-May 1988 run are reported.<
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