Cross-section measurement of exclusive π⁰ muoproduction and firmware design for an FPGA-based detector readout

Studies of the nucleon and its substructure have prompted a number of questions. One of the most prominent question, how do the nucleons properties like spin, mass and size emerge from its constituents, still remains largely unanswered. In the last decades, Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) have received rising attention. They correlate transverse spatial positions and longitudinal momentum fractions and therefore provide new insights into the nucleon and in particular into its helicity structure. The most prominent processes that are sensitive to GPDs are exclusive scattering processes such as Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering (DVCS) and Hard Exclusive Meson Production (HEMP). Among a variety of experiments that bother with the structure of nucleons, the COMPASS experiment at CERN is (and has been) one of the cornerstones in the field. For the COMPASS GPD program, a five weeks pilot run was conducted in 2012. The thorough analysis of the recorded data with an emphasis on the recoil proton detector together with the resulting implementation of vital hardware improvements are subjects of this thesis. The FPGA firmware of the readout is carefully refined and a description of the design is elaborated. The extraction of first physics results from the pilot run data allows not only a glance into the prospects of the COMPASS experiment for future analysis but already provides valuable new information for the field. For the first time, the mean exclusive neutral-pion muoproduction cross-section is extracted in the intermediate x_Bj domain ranging from 0.01 to 0.15.