Experiment and modeling of scintillation photon-counting and current measurement for PMT gain stabilization

Abstract Scintillation detectors with light readout are used for gamma, x-ray and particle detection. Where applicable, photon counting is principally superior to charge integration with regard to accuracy. Most scintillation detectors, however, generate a large number of photons per microsecond for a typical scintillation pulse resulting in significant amounts of pileup. This precludes the separation, and thus direct counting of single photoelectron charges. The algorithm developed and presented in this paper quantifies the coarseness of fast digitized current tracks to construct a photon count dependent, however, electron gain independent charge calculation function. Underlying photoelectrons are interpreted as noise components and retrieved by a modified statistical variance calculation. This method is verified for modeled scintillation pulses and scintillation detector data. It provides a new means for PMT gain stabilization in digital multi-channel analyzers by pulse current analysis.