Phototube non-linearity correction technique

Abstract

Scintillation light is often detected by photo-multiplier tube (PMT) technology. PMTs are however intrinsically non linear devices, especially when operated with high light yield scintillators and high input photon flux. Many physical effects (e.g. inter-dynode field variation, photocathode resistivity, etc.) can spoil the ideal PMT behavior in terms of gain, ending up in what are addressed as the under-linearity and over-linearity effects.Established techniques implemented in the PMT base (e.g. increasing bleeding current, active voltage divider, etc.) can mitigate these effects, but given the unavoidable spread in manufacturing and materials, it turns out that, with respect to linearity at the percent level, every PMT sample is a story of its own.The residual non linearity is usually accounted for with polynomial correction of the spectrum energy scale, starting from the position of a few known energy peaks of calibration sources, but uncertainly remains in between of calibration peaks. We propose to retrieve the calibration information from the entire energy spectrum and not only the position of full energy peaks (FEP), by means of an automatic procedure that also takes into account the quality (signal/noise ratio) of the information about the non-linearity extracted from the various regions of the spectrum.