Monostable systems triggered at random

Abstract

A monostable system (univibrator, blocking oscillator, phantastron, sanaphant, sanatron, electromechanical monostable systems etc.) triggered periodically has constant duration of a quasistable period. In nuclear instrumentation triggering events usually come at random. In this paper a random triggering of monostable systems is analyzed. It is shown that the duration of the quasistable period is not constant, but becomes a stochastical variable, whose statistical distribution depends on the triggering event rate and on the recovery time constant of a system. This distributions are calculated and plotted in normalized form and they are verified by experiments. Identical distributions for all considered monostable systems are obtained and one can expect the same results for other semiconductor or vacuum tube systems not considered here. Methods for elimination of the considered effect are analyzed. On the other hand, on the basis of this effect one can build a simple generator, producing random pulses of random amplitudes or random durations, with controllable distribution functions.