A Statistical Method of Pulse Shape Analysis and Its Application to Nuclear Spectroscopy

A method for analyzing the shape of pulses in the nano- and microsecond ranges on the basis of the delayed coincidence method is described. With the time analyzer channel graduated to a picosecond, it is shown that statistical gating of pulses can be performed using a standard 4096-channel analog-to-digital converter and a personal computer. When applied to study decay schemes of radioactive nuclei, this method makes it possible to ascertain transitions that populate and deexcite a short-lived nuclear state if the half-life of this state is comparable to the duration of the pulse supplied for energy analysis.