This paper describes the concept of an FPGA-based digital camera trigger for imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, developed for the future Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). The proposed camera trigger is designed to select images initiated by the
Cherenkov emission of extended air showers from very-high energy (VHE, E>20 GeV) photons and charged particles while suppressing signatures from background light. The trigger comprises three stages. A first stage employs programmable discriminators to digitize the signals arriving from the camera channels (pixels). At the second stage, a grid of low-cost FPGAs is used to process the digitized signals for camera regions with 37 pixels. At the third stage, trigger conditions found independently in any of the overlapping 37-pixel regions are combined into a global camera trigger by few central FPGAs. Trigger prototype boards based on Xilinx FPGAs have been designed, built and tested and were shown to function properly. Using these components a full camera trigger with a power consumption and price per channel of about 0.5 W and 19 Euro, respectively, can be built. With the described design the camera trigger algorithm can take advantage of pixel information in both the space and the time domain allowing, for example, the creation of triggers sensitive to the time-gradient of a shower image; the time information could also be exploited to online adjust the time window of the acquisition system for pixel data. Combining the results of the parallel execution of different trigger algorithms (optimized, for example, for the lowest and highest energies, respectively) on each FPGA can result in a better response over all photons energies (as demonstrated by Monte Carlo simulation in this work).
PSR B1259-63/LS 2883 is a binary system consisting of a 48 ms pulsar orbitting around a Be star with an orbital period of ~3.4 years. The system was detected at very high energies (VHE; E > 100 GeV) by the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) d
uring its periastron passages in 2004 and 2007. Here we present new H.E.S.S. observations corresponding to its last periastron passage, which occurred on December 15th 2010. These new observations partially overlap with the beginning of a spectacular gamma-ray flare reported by the Fermi-LAT. The H.E.S.S. observations show both flux and spectral properties similar to those reported in previous periastron passages, without any signature of the emission enhancement seen at GeV energies. A careful statistical study based on the Fermi and H.E.S.S. lightcurves leads to the conclusion that the GeV and TeV emission during the flare have a different physical origin. This conlusion, in turn, allows to use Fermi-LAT measurements of the GeV flux as upper limits for the modeling of the VHE emission.
