A method of stabilizing the resolving time of a nuclear acquisition system in real-time

A novel approach to stabilizing the resolving time of a nuclear acquisition system has been implemented that compensates for variations in scintillator decay time in real time. The device described uses the output of the gamma-spectrometer to adjust the pole-zero of the amplifier dynamically. It accomplishes this by maintaining the counting rate losses, or piled-up pulses, to a specific value. This specific value is predetermined during laboratory calibration and is parameterized as a function of the non-piled-up pulses. Adjusting the pole-zero circuit to regulate piled-up counts to this parameterized function forces gamma spectral shapes, counting losses, and counting loss corrections to be consistent over temperature and between detector systems. For the inelastic spectroscopy measurements to which this method has been applied, the method is robust and effective