COLIBRI: partial camera readout and sliding trigger for the Cherenkov Telescope Array CTA

Plans for the future Cherenkov telescope array CTA include replacing the monolithic camera designs used in H.E.S.S. and MAGIC-I by one that is built up from a number of identical segments. These so-called clusters will be relatively autonomous, each containing its own triggering and readout hardware. While this choice was made for reasons of flexibility and ease of manufacture and maintenance, such a concept with semi-independent sub-units lends itself quite naturally to the possibility of new, and more flexible, readout modes. In all previously-used concepts, triggering and readout of the camera is centralised, with a single camera trigger per event that starts the readout of all pixels in the camera at the same time and within the same integration time window. The limitations of such a trigger system can reduce the performance of a large array such as CTA, due to the huge amount of useless data created by night-sky background if trigger thresholds are set low enough to achieve the desired 20 GeV energy threshold, and to image losses at high energies due to the rigid readout window. In this study, an alternative concept (``COLIBRI'' = Concept for an Optimised Local Image Building and Readout Infrastructure) is presented, where only those parts of the camera which are likely to actually contain image data (usually a small percentage of the total pixels) are read out. This leads to a significant reduction of the expected data rate and the dead-times incurred in the camera. Furthermore, the quasi-independence of the individual clusters can be used to read different parts of the camera at slightly different times, thus allowing the readout to follow the slow development of the shower image across the camera field of view. This concept of flexible, partial camera readout is presented in the following, together with a description of Monte-Carlo studies performed to evaluate its performance as well as a hardware implementation proposed for CTA.