Performance comparison between signal digitizers and low-cost digital oscilloscopes: spectroscopic, pulse shape discrimination and timing capabilities for nuclear detectors

Abstract

Signal digitizers revolutionized the approach to the electronics readout of radiation detectors in Nuclear Physics. These highly specialized pieces of equipment are designed to acquire the signals that are characteristic of the detectors in nuclear physics experiments. The functions of the several modules that were once needed for signal acquisition, can now be substituted by a single digitizer. As suggested by the name, with such readout modules, signals are first digitized (i.e. the signal waveform is sampled and converted to a digital representation) and then either stored or analyzed on-the-fly. The performances can be comparable or better than the traditional analog counterparts, in terms of energy, time resolution, and acquisition rate.In this work, we investigate the use of general-purpose digital oscilloscopes as signal digitizers for nuclear detectors. In order to have a proper comparison, we employ a distributed data acquisition system (DAQ), that standardizes the interface between the hardware and the on-line data analysis. The signals, from a set of typical radiation detectors, are digitized and analyzed with the very same algorithms in order to avoid biases due to different software analysis. We compare two traditional signal digitizers (CAEN DT5725 and CAEN DT5751) to two low-cost digital oscilloscopes (Digilent Analog Discovery 2, and Red Pitaya STEMLab 125-14), in terms of their capabilities for spectroscopy (energy resolution), time resolution, pulse shape discrimination, and maximum acquisition rate. K: Data acquisition concepts; Data processing methods; Detector control systems (detector and experiment monitoring and slow-control systems, architecture, hardware, algorithms, databases)1Corresponding author.

Evidence of fast neutron detection capability of the CLLB scintillation detector

“…The installed firmware (Digital Pulse Processing for Charge Integration and Pulse Shape Discrimination, DPP-PSD) can pre-process data determining the pulses timestamps and integrating them over two gates, in order to perform particle discrimination using the so-called double integration method (Pino et al, 2014). The ABCD (Acquisition and Broadcast of Collected Data) software, (Fontana et al, 2017(Fontana et al, , 2018(Fontana et al, , 2020, released as an open-source project 1 s used for data acquisition and electronic control.…”

Application of Oscilloscope Technology in the Early 21st Century: A Systematic Literature Review

“…This process is carried out with the same analysis algorithm on the application of the resulting data. The results are summarized in the table below, sourced from the article reviewed [8]: Table 2…”

“…Acquisition performances were all comparable. In addition, two digital oscilloscopes offer advanced options in embedded firmware that were not evaluated in the article (such as complex trigger logic, onboard coincidence determination, or onboard waveform analysis) [8].…”

Experimental investigation of the ADC sampling rate effect on the digital gamma spectrometry

“…So that the scintillation detectors are very promising for low-cost gamma spectrometer systems [6]. Concerning the ADCs and DPP units, the previously proposed low-cost spectrometer prototypes may be composed of a standalone ADC connected to FPGA modules [7][8][9], a standalone ADC connected to a micro-controller chip [10], a single micro-controller chip with embedded ADC [11], or general-purpose digital oscilloscopes connected to a personal computer [12]. The ADC's sampling rates of these prototypes are not the same.…”

“…The implementation of very low-cost and efficient gamma spectrometers is a hot research topic nowadays [1,[7][8][9][10][11][12]. This target may lead later the gamma spectrometers to be easily available in many research and academic laboratories.…”