Application of the digital pulse processing technique to gas proportional scintillation counters

Digital signal processing techniques have been developed to analyze the signals from a gas proportional scintillation counter (GPSC). Compared to analog systems, the digital technique is a very simple and powerful tool for manipulating and improving pulse-height distributions with no additional electronic components. Among the features inherent in digital signal processing are pulse risetime discrimination, pulse pileup correction and rejection, and background rejection. By allowing the rejection of signal pulses from X-ray interactions within the scintillation region and/or near insensitive regions of the detector, an improvement in the pulse-height distribution has been effectively achieved. Using this technique the energy resolution for the 22.1 keV line of a /sup 109/Cd X-ray source improves from 5.6 to 5.1% and the peak-to-background ratio increases from 30 to 170.