Single-Photon Decay Spectroscopy. II. The Pile-up Problem

Abstract

When Rutherford and Geiger tested the independence of simultaneous α particle emissions their results showed only general agreement with expectation. The main failure in retrospect appears to be the neglect of dead time, the processing time of the ocular system for counting flashes, which we find from their results to be about 0.5 s. This paper deals with pile-up in photon counting and related fields. We deal with multichannel scaling and the measurement of time-dependent fluorescence processes for sources of various characteristics. Both mathematical and electronic methods of dealing with the problem are discussed.