A simplified spectrometer based on a fast digital oscilloscope for the measurement of high energy $\gamma$-rays

Abstract

A simplified digital spectrometer for the study of $\gamma$-rays with energies up to $\sim100$ MeV is presented and tested. The spectrometer is only consisted of a fast digital oscilloscope and three scintillation detectors which can work in single or in coincidence modes: two BGO-detectors comprising $\varnothing\,7.62\times7.62$ cm BGO-crystalls and one plastic detector which includes an organic polystyrene-based scintillator. The basic properties of the spectrometer (energy resolution, time resolution, $\gamma$-rays detection efficiency) were studied exhaustively also using a Geant4-based Monte-Carlo simulation. Several numerical algorithms for processing of waveforms in offline mode were proposed and tested to perform digital timing, pulse area measurement and processing of pile-up events without rejection. As a result, the spectrometer demonstrated $\sim10\%$ better energy resolution than was obtained by a common 10-bit CAMAC ADC with the same detectors. And the developed algorithm based on the pulse shape analysis for processing of pile-up events showed high efficiency under severe conditions (the portion of pile-ups contained $\sim30\%$). The measured maximum counting rate of the spectrometer was $1.8\times10^5$ waveforms/sec.