The Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The CLEO-III trigger system (designed and built by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is still working extremely well. As luminosity is integrated and diagnostics are honed, we are uncovering only very minor problems.

The test system used to evaluate over six hundred tile daughter boards was cobbled together from a mix of NIM and CAMAC electronics, and run by a DEC microVax 3600. Built in part in 1988 with funds from the University of Illinois Research Board, we have assembled a modern test facility based on PCI-bus instrumentation installed in a PC, which runs LabVIEW. The LabVIEW system runs a pair of newly designed circuit boards which generate test pulses and provide services for daughter boards under test, and then route selected signals to the PCI instrumentation for digitization and analysis. The old system required twenty minutes to test one board; our estimates are that the new system will only need a few minutes to perform considerably more detailed tests of each board. LabVIEW-based analysis software for the new test facility is under construction.

We use the CLEO detector at CESR to study the properties of thetau lepton and of particles containing the b and c quarks. These studies allow us to perform stringent tests of the standard model of particle physics. We are working on a silicon microstrip vertex detector which will give 0.1 psec time resolution for particle lifetimes. This will significantly enhance the experiment's sensitivity to new physics.

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