The NOvA Power Distribution System

Abstract

We describe the power distribution systems and grounding schemes built for the near and far detectors of the NOvA long-baseline neutrino experiment. They are used to power the avalanche photodiodes and their thermoelectric coolers, the front-end boards that read out, digitize and time stamp the signals from the avalanche photodiodes, and the data concentrator modules used to receive and format the data from the front-end boards before sending them to a farm of computers used to build the events. The system powers 344,064 readout channels in the far detector and 20,192 channels in the near detector.