An innovative method for dead time correction in nuclear spectroscopy

D. Upp; R. Keyser; D. Gedcke; T. Twomey; R. Bingham

doi:10.1023/a:1010628008715

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Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry

Volume/Issue:: Volume 248: Issue 2

An innovative method for dead time correction in nuclear spectroscopy

Authors:

D. Upp

D. Upp Perkin Elmer Instruments, Inc., Ortec 801 South Illinois Avenue Oak Ridge TN 37831 USA

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R. Keyser

R. Keyser Perkin Elmer Instruments, Inc., Ortec 801 South Illinois Avenue Oak Ridge TN 37831 USA

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D. Gedcke

D. Gedcke Perkin Elmer Instruments, Inc., Ortec 801 South Illinois Avenue Oak Ridge TN 37831 USA

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T. Twomey

T. Twomey Perkin Elmer Instruments, Inc., Ortec 801 South Illinois Avenue Oak Ridge TN 37831 USA

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R. Bingham

R. Bingham Perkin Elmer Instruments, Inc., Ortec 801 South Illinois Avenue Oak Ridge TN 37831 USA

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Pages:: 377–383

Online Publication Date:: 29 Oct 2004

Publication Date:: 17 May 2001

Article Category:: Research Article

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1010628008715

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Abstract

All nuclear spectroscopy systems, whether measuring charged particles, X-rays, or gamma-rays, exhibit dead time losses during the counting process due to pulse processing in the electronics. Several techniques have been employed in an effort to reduce the effects of dead time losses on a spectroscopy system including live time clocks and loss-free counting modules. Live time extension techniques give accurate results when measuring samples in which the activity remains roughly constant during the measuring process (i.e., the dead time does not change significantly during a single measurement period). The loss-free counting method of correcting for dead time losses, as introduced by HARMS and improved by WESTPHAL (US Patent No. 4,476,384) give better results than live time extension techniques when the counting rate changes significantly during the measurement. However, loss-free counting methods are limited by the fact that an estimation of the uncertainty associated with the spectral counts can not be easily determined, because the corrected data no longer obeys Poisson statistics. Therefore, accurate analysis of the spectral data including the uncertainty calculations is difficult to achieve. The Ortec® DSPEC^PLUS implements an improved zero dead time method that accurately predicts the uncertainty from counting statistics and overcomes the limitations of previous loss-free counting methods. The uncertainty in the dead-time corrected spectrum is calculated and stored with the spectral data (Patent Pending). The GammaVision-32® analysis algorithm has been improved to propagate this uncertainty through the activity calculation. Two experiments are set up to verify these innovations. The experiments show that the new method gives the same reported activity and associated uncertainties as the well-proven Gedcke-Hale live time clock. It is thus shown that over a wide range of dead times the new ZDT method tracks the true counting rate as if it had zero dead time, and yields an accurate estimation of the statistical uncertainty in the reported counts.

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Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry

Print ISSN:: 0236-5731

Online ISSN:: 1588-2780

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Journal of Radionalytical and Nuclear Chemistry
Language	English
Size	A4
Year of Foundation	1968
Volumes per Year	1
Issues per Year	12
Founder	Akadémiai Kiadó
Founder's Address	H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245.
Publisher	Akadémiai Kiadó Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Publisher's Address	H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245. CH-6330 Cham, Switzerland Gewerbestrasse 11.
Responsible Publisher	Chief Executive Officer, Akadémiai Kiadó
ISSN	0236-5731 (Print)
ISSN	1588-2780 (Online)