Radiation spectroscopy using seeded localized averaging ("SLA")

A new technique for acquiring radiation spectra was developed. This technique is called seeded localized averaging ("SLA"). A principal feature of the SLA method and the fundamental difference from the conventional spectrum-building method is the use of more than one pulse-height measurement to obtain the address of the channel that increments. That is, two or more pulse-height measurements are averaged to obtain an average channel address. The average channel address is used to increment the corresponding channel in the spectrum memory. The counting statistics is preserved by using pipeline based pulse-height recycling scheme. SLA technique works in real time by averaging pulse-height measurements in localized windows. The use of average channel addresses reduces the FWHM of the recorded spectral peaks. The technique has been applied to various detectors and applications