The No Upsilon A Far Detector Data Acquisition System

The NOvA experiment is a long-baseline neutrino experiment designed to make measurements to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy, neutrino mixing parameters and CP violation in the neutrino sector. In order to make these measurements the NOvA collaboration has designed a highly distributed, synchronized, continuous digitization and readout system that is able to acquire and correlate data from the Fermi lab accelerator complex (NuMI), the NOvA near detector at the Fermi lab site and the NOvA far detector which is located 810 km away at Ash River, MN. This system has unique properties that let it fully exploit the physics capabilities of the NOvA detector. The design of the NOvA DAQ system and its capabilities are discussed in this paper.