Inter-laboratory synchronization for the CNGS project

J. Serrano , P. Álvarez , J. Lewis , D. Autiero (1)

1 IPNL - Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon

CERN will start sending a neutrino beam to Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy in July 2006. This beam will cover a distance of around 730 km through the crust of the earth from an extraction line in CERN's SPS to dedicated detectors in Gran Sasso. This paper describes the technological choices made to fulfill the specification of inter-laboratory synchronization in the region of 100 ns, as well as some preliminary results. The common time standard is UTC as disseminated by the GPS system, and the techniques are similar to those used by national metrology laboratories for the manufacturing of UTC itself. In addition, real-time messages sent through the Internet allow the detectors in Gran Sasso to go into calibration mode when no beam is being sent. Data concerning the delay and determinism of this international network link is also presented.

Domaines: Instrumentations et Détecteurs [physics.ins-det]

J. Serrano, P. Álvarez, J. Lewis, D. Autiero. Inter-laboratory synchronization for the CNGS project. Tenth European Particle Accelerator Conference "EPAC'06", Jun 2006, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. pp.3092-3094. ⟨in2p3-00409182⟩