Baseline restoration and pile-up correction based on bipolar cusp-like shaping for high-resolution radiation spectroscopy

Abstract

The baseline may shift in many radiation measurement systems. The shift is time variant and depends on the events. Also, with high count rates, pulses may overlap in random time intervals. These phenomena can affect the peak values of the pulses. Piled-up events are traditionally rejected, but this reduces the detection efficiency considerably. In other approaches, the corrupted events are reconstructed, and information about the single pulses is extracted. The peaks carry much of the basic information, so many shaping methods have been proposed so far. For pile-up mitigation, a narrow unipolar shaping is enough, but a baseline shift is eliminated by using bipolar shaping. However, the latter decreases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which is critical for high-resolution spectroscopy. In this paper, we propose bipolar cusp-like shaping as a tradeoff between mitigating the baseline shift and pulse pile-up. A novel recursive algorithm, implementable on digital pulse processors (DPPs), is introduced and is then evaluated. Finally, the superior noise-reduction capability is studied by using Monte Carlo simulations, a real piled-up pulse stream shaped by using the algorithm, and the results show its advantages.