Abstract
The pulse pile-up effect can significantly degrade the spectroscopic performance of scintillation radiation detectors at high counting rates. This paper reports on a digital pulse processing method for shortening the duration of scintillation pulses, thereby alleviating the pulse pile-up effect. The method operates based on replacing the decay-time constant of the scintillation pulses with a shorter decay-time constant. The details of the digital algorithm are presented and the performance of the method at a high counting rate of 795 kHz is experimentally examined with a NaI(Tl) detector. The effects of the pulse shortening on the spectroscopic performance of the system are also discussed.