A comparison of digital zero-crossing and charge-comparison methods for neutron/gamma-ray discrimination with liquid scintillation detectors

作者：Nakhostin M^*

来源：Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment , 2015, 797: 77-82.

DOI：10.1016/j.nima.2015.06.041

• Pulse-shape discrimination
• Liquid scintillation detectors
• Zero-crossing method

In this paper, we have compared the performances of the digital zero-crossing and charge-comparison methods for n/gamma discrimination with liquid scintillation detectors at low light outputs. The measurements were performed with a 2 '' x 2 '' cylindrical liquid scintillation detector of type BC501A whose outputs were sampled by means of a fast waveform digitizer with 10-bit resolution, 4 GS/s sampling rate and one volt input range. Different light output ranges were measured by operating the photomultiplier tube at different voltages and a new recursive algorithm was developed to implement the digital zerocrossing method. The results of our study demonstrate the superior performance of the digital zerocrossing method at low light outputs when a large dynamic range is measured. However, when the input range of the digitizer is used to measure a narrow range of light outputs, the charge-comparison method slightly outperforms the zero-crossing method. The results are discussed in regard to the effects of the quantization noise and the noise filtration performance of the zero-crossing filter.

• 出版日期2015-10-11