A THEORETICAL COMPARISON BETWEEN PULSE-AREA AND PULSE-HEIGHT ERRORS PRODUCED BY COLLECTION-TIME VARIATIONS

Although pulse-height analysis is widely used in nuclear spectroscopy, the energy resolution using this technique is degraded by several factors, one of the more important being the charge collection-time variation. Resolution errors resulting from this variation can be reduced significantly by the more recently introduced area-to-amplitude conversion technique. To investigate the advantages of this technique, a mathematical treatment of the area-to-amplitude (AAC) technique using delay-line clipping was developed. The resolution error as a function of integrating time was then derived. From the resulting equations, an error chart was developed to facilitate the evaluation of practical systems. A general class of input driving functions was also analyzed and discussed. A comparison between the area-to-amplitude conversion technique and the peak-amplitude detection technique indicated that, under most conditions, the AAC technique produces a significantly smaller resolution error. © 1968.