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In this article we present a method of characterizing scintillating materials by digitization of each individual scintillation pulse followed by digital signal processing. With this technique it is possible to measure the pulse shape and the energy of an absorbed gamma photon on an event-by-event basis. In contrast to time-correlated single photon counting technique, the digital approach provides a faster measurement, an active noise suppression, and enables characterization of scintillation pulses simultaneously in two domains: time and energy. We applied this method to study the pulse shape change of a CsI(Tl) scintillator with energy of gamma excitation. We confirmed previously published results and revealed new details of the phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Positron emission tomography (PET) is an imaging technique that provides the spatial distribution of radiopharmaceuticals labeled with positron emitting radioisotopes by detecting the gamma rays produced from positron–electron annihilation. Recently, a time-of-flight (TOF) PET has drawn an increasing attention because it is capable of reducing the scan time or injected dose with improved the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in reconstructed PET images by precisely localizing the emission point along the line-of-response using TOF information. This study presents a multiplexing method that can effectively reduce the number of readout channels of a silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) based TOF PET while achieving excellent timing resolution. A capacitive multiplexing method was employed that could improve the degradation of the timing performance occurring in a conventional resistive multiplexing method. In addition, a high-speed signal processing method is also presented for the TOF PET. A TOF PET prototype was developed to demonstrate the imaging capability of the TOF PET system. A flood histogram of a PET detector module, composed of an 8 × 8 array of 3.01 × 3.01 × 20.00 mm3 lutetium fine silicate (LFS) scintillators and an 8 × 8 array of 3.16 × 3.16 mm2 SiPMs, was acquired using the proposed method. All 64 scintillators were successfully resolved in the flood histogram. The average energy resolution and coincidence resolving time (CRT) were 14.2 ± 1.1% and 431 ± 41 ps full width at half maximum (FWHM), respectively. A tomographic image of the hot-rod phantom was successfully acquired using the TOF PET prototype, and rods with a size of 2.4 mm in diameter were clearly resolved in the reconstructed image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fully digital, prototype data acquisition system upgrade for the TOFOR neutron time-of-flight neutron spectrometer at the JET experimental fusion reactor in Culham, England, has been constructed. This upgrade, TOFu (Time-of-Flight upgrade), enables digitization of associated time and energy deposition information from the TOFOR scintillator detectors, facilitating discrimination of spectral background due to unrelated neutron events based on kinematic considerations. In this publication, a kinematic background discrimination method is presented using synthetic data and validated with experimental results. It is found that an improvement in signal-to-background ratio of 500% in certain spectral regions is possible with the new DAQ system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have developed a Compact Fast Neutron Spectrometer (CFNS) for passive assay of special nuclear material (SNM) through the observation of fast neutrons. The CFNS consists of eight organic glass scintillators (OGS) coupled to silicon photomultipliers and a waveform digitizer, which are integrated within a human-portable box. The CFNS determines the neutron energy profile by spectrum unfolding using the Maximum-Likelihood Expectation Maximization method. The detector acquisition system was optimized to have a dynamic range of up to 10 MeV neutron energy. Bulk special nuclear material (SNM) measurements from the National Criticality Experiments Research Center were analyzed for SNM validation/examination. The results show that the CFNS can be used to distinguish between fission and (α , n) neutron emitters, regardless of intervening material type (Cu and polyethylene) and thickness, by taking the ratio of neutron counts at different regions in the unfolded energy spectrum. Additionally, by fitting an exponential curve to the unfolded energy spectrum of PuO 2 and Pu neutron emitters, the CFNS showed the ability of distinguishing between pure Pu oxide, pure Pu metal and mixed oxide-metal configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]