Interior temperature monitoring of NaI(Tl) crystal in space environment by pulse width measurement
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Yongwei Dong; Wen Xing; Yanguo Li; Yongjie Zhang; Li-Ming Song; Bobing Wu; Junying Chai; Shixiu Kang; Yifei Zhang; Shuang-Nan Zhang
- Source
- Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment. 615:272-276
- Subject
- Physics
Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Scintillation
Spectrum analyzer
Physics::Instrumentation and Detectors
business.industry
Detector
Atmospheric temperature range
Pulse (physics)
Crystal
Amplitude
Optics
business
Instrumentation
Pulse-width modulation
- Language
- ISSN
- 0168-9002
In this paper, we develop a direct and reliable method of monitoring the interior temperature of a NaI(Tl) crystal in space environment. This method employs the temperature-dependent pulse width measured with a new pulse shape analyzer (PSA). The temperature dependence of the scintillation properties of the NaI(Tl) crystal is measured three times in the temperature range -20 to 45 degrees C from August to December 2008. Those measurements show that the pulse width of the NaI(Tl) crystal monotonically depends only on the temperature of the crystal. The relation between pulse width and temperature of the NaI(Tl) crystal is calibrated with a third-order polynomial. We apply this relation to monitor the interior temperature of the NaI(Tl) crystal under thermal non-equilibrium environments. We found that the crystal's interior temperature is generally quite different from that of its surrounding locations. This method is then used to improve the energy resolution of the detector in a temperature varying environment, by correcting the signal amplitude of each recorded event based on its pulse width. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.