Nuclear Electronics

1. Introduction.- 2. Radiation Detectors and Related Circuits.- 2.1. Ionization Chamber.- 2.1.1. Energy Required for the Generation of One Charge Carrier Pair.- 2.1.2. Mobility of the Charge Carriers.- 2.1.3. The Pulse Shape.- 2.1.4. Preamplifier Circuits.- 2.2. Proportional Counters.- 2.2.1. Detection Mechanism and Pulse Shape in the Proportional Counter.- 2.2.2. Statistics of the Multiplication Process.- 2.2.3. Preamplifier Circuits.- 2.3. Geiger-Müller-Counters.- 2.3.1. Detection Mechanism and Pulse Shape in the GM Counter.- 2.3.2. Quenching Circuits.- 2.4. Semiconductor Detectors.- 2.4.1. Characteristic Properties of Semiconductor Detectors.- 2.4.2. Energy Required to Form a Hole-Electron Pair.- 2.4.3. The Pulse Shape in the pn and pin Detectors.- 2.4.4. Preamplifiers and Related Circuits.- 2.5. Scintillation and ?erenkov Counters.- 2.5.1. Principle of a Scintillation Counter.- 2.5.2. The Pulse Shape.- 2.5.3. Photomultiplier Statistics and the Pulse Height.- 2.5.4. Thermal Noise.- 2.5.5. Signal Circuits Used in Scintillation Counters.- 2.5.6. Auxiliary Circuits.- 2.5.7. Scintillation Counter Stabilizer Circuits.- 2.5.8. ?erenkov Counter.- 3. Analog Circuits.- 3.1. Linear Pulse Amplifiers.- 3.1.1. General Considerations, Linearity.- 3.1.2. The Transient Response of an Amplifier.- 3.1.3. Pulse Shaping.- 3.1.4. Sum Effects.- 3.1.5. Overload Recovery Ill.- 3.1.6. Practical Design Criteria.- 3.1.7. Amplifiers with Variable Gain.- 3.2. Arithmetic Operations on Analog Signals.- 3.2.1. Operational Amplifiers.- 3.2.2. Arithmetic Operations on Pulse Amplitudes.- 3.2.3. Practical Circuits.- 3.3. Window Amplifiers.- 3.4. Linear Gates.- 3.5. Pulse Stretchers.- 3.6. Fast Pulse Amplifiers.- 4. Analog-to-Digital Converters.- 4.1. Pulse Height Discriminators.- 4.1.1. The Principle of a Multivibrator.- 4.1.2. Integral Discriminators.- 4.1.3. Differential Discriminators.- 4.1.4. Multiple Arrays of Differential Discriminators.- 4.1.5. Conservation of the Time Information in a Discriminator.- 4.1.6. Fast Tunnel Diode Discriminators.- 4.2. Digital Encoding of the Pulse Height.- 4.2.1. Converters of the Wilkinson Type.- 4.2.2. Other Converter Systems.- 4.3.Pulse Shape Discriminators.- 5. Evaluation of the Time Information.- 5.1. General Considerations, Resolution.- 5.2. Pulse Shapers for Coincidence Circuits and Time-to-Digital Converters.- 5.3. Coincidence Circuits.- 5.3.1. Ideal Coincidence Stage.- 5.3.2. Practical Circuits.- 5.3.3. The Chronotron Principle.- 5.4. Digital Encoding of the Time Interval.- 5.4.1. Direct Digital Encoding.- 5.4.2. Principle of a Time-to-Pulse-Height Converter.- 5.4.3. Start-Stop Converter.- 5.4.4. Overlap Converter.- 5.4.5. The Vernier Principle.- 5.5. Auxiliary Circuits.- 6. Digital Circuits.- 6.1. Basic Digital Circuits.- 6.1.1. Fundamentals of Boolean Algebra, Gates.- 6.1.2. Circuitry of Different Logics.- 6.1.3. The Flip-Flop.- 6.1.4. Practical Flip-Flop Circuits.- 6.1.5. Tunnel Diode Circuits.- 6.2. Scalers and Registers.- 6.2.1. Shift Registers.- 6.2.2. Pulse Scalers.- 6.3. Logical and Arithmetical Digital Circuits.- 6.4. Memories.- 6.5. Data Output.- 6.6. Count Rate Meters.- 7. Data Processing.- 7.1. Simple Counting Systems.- 7.2. Multiscaler Arrays.- 7.3. Multichannel Analyzers.- 7.4. Multiparameter Analyzers.- 7.5. On-Line Computers.- 8. Appendix.- 8.1. Laplace Transform Calculus.- 8.1.1. Networks.- 8.1.2. Naive Operational Calculus.- 8.1.3. Laplace Transformation.- 8.1.3.1. Rules of the Laplace Transformation.- 8.1.3.2. Application of the Laplace Transformation in the Network Analysis.- 8.1.3.3. Inverse Transformation of Rational Functions F(p).- 8.1.3.4. Stability Considerations.- 8.1.3.5. Approximations.- 8.2. Noise.- 8.2.1. General Considerations, Concept of Equivalent Noise Charge.- 8.2.2. Noise Sources.- 8.2.3. The Noise of an Amplifier with the Transfer Function G(p).- 8.2.4. Noise in a Charge Sensitive Amplifier.- 8.2.5. Properties of Input Stages with Vacuum Tubes, Bipolar Transistors and FET.- 8.2.6. Noise and Resolution.- 9. References.- 10. Subject Index.