Pickup and interference in particle astrophysics experiments: techniques and tools

Abstract

Contamination of signals by pickup and interference is a recurrent problem in physics experiments, the suppression of which consumes much time and effort. Techniques are presented which allow the time-domain assessment of mitigation techniques. A pick-off circuit is presented which facilitates the investigation of AC power-line borne transients without danger to the experimenter or damage to oscilloscopes. The circuit is simple to construct and low-cost. The output of this circuit may be used to veto or identify interference produced events so that they are not subsequently included in analysis.