Experimental verification for optimal design of the filter-based spectrometer

Abstract

Filter-based spectrometers are widely used in the diagnostics of laser-plasma-generated X/gamma-ray pulses. The highly ill-conditioned characteristic of the filter-based spectrometer response matrix is a primary factor limiting their measurement accuracy. In this paper, the genetic algorithm is used to optimize the configuration of the filter-based spectrometer to alleviate the ill-conditioned response. The effectiveness of optimization was investigated under different conditions such as different measurement errors, different spectrum shapes and different unfolding algorithms by numerical experiment. Furthermore, the optimized and non-optimized filter stack spectrometer were implemented and irradiated by X-ray tubes. These results show that the optimization can effectively reduce the divergence of the unfolded spectrum for continuous spectrum X-ray detection and improve peak unfolding accuracy for monochromatic X-ray detection.