Exploring the Pulse Shape Discrimination capabilities of the dE silicon detectors of the EUCLIDES array

EUCLIDES is a Silicon-ball detector used as an ancillary device of the gamma-ray spectrometer GALILEO at Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro (LNL). The main function of EUCLIDES is to maximize the selectivity and the efficiency of GALILEO through the simultaneous detection of charged particles and gamma rays in fusion-evaporation processes. EUCLIDES consists of 55 dE-E telescopes of hexagonal and pentagonal shapes, whose thicknesses are about 130 and 1000 micron for dE and E layers, respectively, and whose surfaces are 10 cm^2 each. In typical fusion-evaporation processes, the 5 most forward positioned telescopes have to deal with higher counting rates with respect to the others, thus they are segmented in 4 equal parts, which have individual electronic processing circuits, to reduce the probability of pile-up. In December 2017, the EUCLIDES array was used in an in-beam experiment, during which a CAEN V1730B, which is a VME 500 MS/s digitizer, housing 16 channels, was employed to readout 3 segments of one of the most forward telescopes. An additional channel was connected to the OR signal of the Neutron Wall array, which, in this experiment, presents the advantage of being a high efficiency gamma-ray detector with a fast response. The aim of the implementation of the digitizer in the read-out chain of EUCLIDES is to have the possibility to disentangle alpha particles and protons stopping in the dE layer, which can represent more than 50% of the detected particles: being able to benefit from this huge statistic, in coincidence with the GALILEO events, would certainly be a great advantage. The methods used in this work for the data analysis are the trapezoidal filter technique, for the esteem of the energy, and the CFD difference between two signals, for the evaluation of the time resolution.