Nuclear Science and Techniques

Abstract:

Digital pulse processing has developed rapidly during recent years. Moreover, it has been widely applied in many fields. In this study, we introduce a digital pulse processing method for 2πα and 2πβ emitter measurement. Our digital pulse processing method for 2πα and 2πβ emitter measurement is comprised of a field-programmable gate-array-based acquisition card and a pulse-height analysis routine. We established two channels (one for the α emitter and one for the β emitter) on an acquisition board using an analog-to-digital converter with a 16-bit resolution at a speed of 100 million samples per second. In this study, we used captured and stored data to analyze emission rate counts and spectrums. The method we established takes into account noise cancelation, dead-time correction, background subtraction, and zero-energy extrapolation. We carefully designed control procedures in order to simplify pulse-width fitting and threshold-level setting. We transmitted data and commands through a universal serial bus between the acquisition board and the computer. The results of our tests prove that our method performs well in pulse reconstruction fidelity and amplitude measurement accuracy. Compared with the current standard method for measuring 2πα and 2πβ emission rates, our system demonstrates excellent precision in emission rate counting.

Key words: Digital pulse processing, α and β emitter measurement, FPGA