by Wikibooks, open books for an open world
Available in 104 free installments
Owner:
This is an electronic technique which allows a spectrum to be acquired using two types of circuitry. One circuit is called a Lower Level Discriminator which only allows voltages pulses through it which are lower than its setting. The other is called an Upper Level Discriminator which only allows voltage pulses though which are (you guessed it!) higher than its setting.
The result of using both these circuits in combination is a variable-width window which can be placed anywhere along a spectrum. For example if we wished to obtain information from the photopeak only of our simplified spectrum we would place the discrimination controls as shown in the following figure:
A final point to note here is that since the scintillation detector is widely used to obtain information about the energies of the radiation emitted from a radioactive source it is frequently referred to as a Scintillation Spectrometer.
