Using fast digital converters to detect bremsstrahlung radiation during the alpha decay of heavy nuclei

Abstract

A large-volume germanium detector coupled with fast signal digitizers is proposed for use in experiments to study interference effects in yields of the bremsstrahlung radiation that accompanies alpha decays of heavy nuclei. When wavelet processing is applied to the signals from detectors, the time resolution can be as fine as ~30 ns for a detector with a volume of ≥100 cm3. This method is used to measure experimentally the probability of the emission of γ-quanta from excited states of daughter nuclei produced in the α-decay chain of 226Ra.