Design and implementation of a virtual nuclear pulse signal generator

Abstract

This paper presents a virtual nuclear pulse signal generator. The pulse generator can be used in specific scenarios such as calibration and maintenance of nuclear detection systems, validation of nuclear signal processing algorithms, and nuclear physics teaching experiments, as a substitute for real radioactive sources and detectors to generate nuclear pulse signals. This helps to avoid exposing experimental personnel to radiation hazards. The pulse generator is capable of generating specific nuclear pulse signals according to experimental requirements, and these signals has the same physical characteristics as real nuclear pulse signals, including amplitude distribution, time and amplitude randomness. In the pulse generator, we conducted theoretical analysis of the radioactive source and detector, and established a model library for both, to obtain crucial parameters of the nuclear pulse signals. The pulse generator is built on a hardware framework with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) as the core, utilizing these key parameters to generate signals with realistic physical characteristics of nuclear pulse signals, including amplitude and time characteristics. The counting rate of the output nuclear pulse signals can be adjusted by configuring the hardware parameters of the pulse generator.