Nuclear Electronics

ISBN-13: 9783642876646 / Niemiecki / Miękka / 2012 / 402 str.

Emil Kowalski

Opis

Electronics is the most important tool in nuclear radiation metrology. Without electronic instruments most of the problems concerned with measurement in pure or applied nuclear research, radiation protection or the use of radioactive isotopes in industrial process control would remain unsolved. Conversely, the radiation metrology was one of the first areas, if not the first, outside communications in which electronic devices were successfully employed. The quantum nature of nuclear radiations deter mined the need to work with pulse-type signals and thus contributed substantially to the establishment of analog and digital pulse techniques in electronics. It was no coincidence that, as late as 1949, W. C. ELMORE and M. SANDS were able to call the first monograph on nuclear electronics quite simply "Electronics." Despite these close interrelations between electronics and radiation measurement in nuclear physics, there is virtually no modern monograph dealing with the specialized electronic circuits and instruments used in measuring nuclear radiation. ELMORE and SANDS has long since become obsolete and, similarly, the excellent works covering special areas of nuclear electronics (e. g. A. B. GILLESPIE'S "Signal, Noise and Resolution in Nuclear Counter Amplifiers," 1953; I. A. D. LEWIS and F. H. WELLS' "Millimicrosecond Pulse Techniques," 1959; or R. L. CHASE'S "Nuclear Pulse Spectrometry," 1961) now lag well behind the latest advances in technology*)."

Spis treści

1. Introduction.- 2. Radiation Detectors and Related Circuits.- 2.1. Ionization Chamber.- 2.1.1. Energy Required for the Generation of One Charge Carrier Pair.- 2.1.2. Mobility of the Charge Carriers.- 2.1.3. The Pulse Shape.- 2.1.4. Preamplifier Circuits.- 2.2. Proportional Counters.- 2.2.1. Detection Mechanism and Pulse Shape in the Proportional Counter.- 2.2.2. Statistics of the Multiplication Process.- 2.2.3. Preamplifier Circuits.- 2.3. Geiger-Müller-Counters.- 2.3.1. Detection Mechanism and Pulse Shape in the GM Counter.- 2.3.2. Quenching Circuits.- 2.4. Semiconductor Detectors.- 2.4.1. Characteristic Properties of Semiconductor Detectors.- 2.4.2. Energy Required to Form a Hole-Electron Pair.- 2.4.3. The Pulse Shape in the pn and pin Detectors.- 2.4.4. Preamplifiers and Related Circuits.- 2.5. Scintillation and ?erenkov Counters.- 2.5.1. Principle of a Scintillation Counter.- 2.5.2. The Pulse Shape.- 2.5.3. Photomultiplier Statistics and the Pulse Height.- 2.5.4. Thermal Noise.- 2.5.5. Signal Circuits Used in Scintillation Counters.- 2.5.6. Auxiliary Circuits.- 2.5.7. Scintillation Counter Stabilizer Circuits.- 2.5.8. ?erenkov Counter.- 3. Analog Circuits.- 3.1. Linear Pulse Amplifiers.- 3.1.1. General Considerations, Linearity.- 3.1.2. The Transient Response of an Amplifier.- 3.1.3. Pulse Shaping.- 3.1.4. Sum Effects.- 3.1.5. Overload Recovery Ill.- 3.1.6. Practical Design Criteria.- 3.1.7. Amplifiers with Variable Gain.- 3.2. Arithmetic Operations on Analog Signals.- 3.2.1. Operational Amplifiers.- 3.2.2. Arithmetic Operations on Pulse Amplitudes.- 3.2.3. Practical Circuits.- 3.3. Window Amplifiers.- 3.4. Linear Gates.- 3.5. Pulse Stretchers.- 3.6. Fast Pulse Amplifiers.- 4. Analog-to-Digital Converters.- 4.1. Pulse Height Discriminators.- 4.1.1. The Principle of a Multivibrator.- 4.1.2. Integral Discriminators.- 4.1.3. Differential Discriminators.- 4.1.4. Multiple Arrays of Differential Discriminators.- 4.1.5. Conservation of the Time Information in a Discriminator.- 4.1.6. Fast Tunnel Diode Discriminators.- 4.2. Digital Encoding of the Pulse Height.- 4.2.1. Converters of the Wilkinson Type.- 4.2.2. Other Converter Systems.- 4.3.Pulse Shape Discriminators.- 5. Evaluation of the Time Information.- 5.1. General Considerations, Resolution.- 5.2. Pulse Shapers for Coincidence Circuits and Time-to-Digital Converters.- 5.3. Coincidence Circuits.- 5.3.1. Ideal Coincidence Stage.- 5.3.2. Practical Circuits.- 5.3.3. The Chronotron Principle.- 5.4. Digital Encoding of the Time Interval.- 5.4.1. Direct Digital Encoding.- 5.4.2. Principle of a Time-to-Pulse-Height Converter.- 5.4.3. Start-Stop Converter.- 5.4.4. Overlap Converter.- 5.4.5. The Vernier Principle.- 5.5. Auxiliary Circuits.- 6. Digital Circuits.- 6.1. Basic Digital Circuits.- 6.1.1. Fundamentals of Boolean Algebra, Gates.- 6.1.2. Circuitry of Different Logics.- 6.1.3. The Flip-Flop.- 6.1.4. Practical Flip-Flop Circuits.- 6.1.5. Tunnel Diode Circuits.- 6.2. Scalers and Registers.- 6.2.1. Shift Registers.- 6.2.2. Pulse Scalers.- 6.3. Logical and Arithmetical Digital Circuits.- 6.4. Memories.- 6.5. Data Output.- 6.6. Count Rate Meters.- 7. Data Processing.- 7.1. Simple Counting Systems.- 7.2. Multiscaler Arrays.- 7.3. Multichannel Analyzers.- 7.4. Multiparameter Analyzers.- 7.5. On-Line Computers.- 8. Appendix.- 8.1. Laplace Transform Calculus.- 8.1.1. Networks.- 8.1.2. Naive Operational Calculus.- 8.1.3. Laplace Transformation.- 8.1.3.1. Rules of the Laplace Transformation.- 8.1.3.2. Application of the Laplace Transformation in the Network Analysis.- 8.1.3.3. Inverse Transformation of Rational Functions F(p).- 8.1.3.4. Stability Considerations.- 8.1.3.5. Approximations.- 8.2. Noise.- 8.2.1. General Considerations, Concept of Equivalent Noise Charge.- 8.2.2. Noise Sources.- 8.2.3. The Noise of an Amplifier with the Transfer Function G(p).- 8.2.4. Noise in a Charge Sensitive Amplifier.- 8.2.5. Properties of Input Stages with Vacuum Tubes, Bipolar Transistors and FET.- 8.2.6. Noise and Resolution.- 9. References.- 10. Subject Index.