Performance of the new RD51 VMM3a/SRS beam telescope — studying MPGDs simultaneously in energy, space and time at high rates

The RD51 collaboration maintains a common infrastructure at CERN for its R & Dactivities, including two beam telescopes for test beam campaigns. Recently, one of the beamtelescopes has been equipped and commissioned with new multi-channel and charge-sensitivefront-end electronics based on the ATLAS/BNL VMM3a front-end ASIC and the RD51 Scalable ReadoutSystem (SRS). This allows to read out the detectors at high rates (up to the MHz regime) withelectronics time resolutions of the order of 1 ns and the ability to handle different detectortypes and sizes, due to a larger dynamic range compared to the previous front-end electronicsbased on the APV25 ASIC. Having studied and improved the beam telescope's performance over thecourse of three test beam campaigns, the results are presented in this paper.