Scintillation Decay Times of Organic Crystals

Abstract

A new experimental technique is described for measuring scintillation decay times in the millimicrosecond region. The method developed uses the fact that a pulsed current, as delivered by the photomultiplier scintillation counter produces a far greater power dissipation in a resistive load than does the same mean steady current. By measuring the power dissipated the pulse duration, and hence the scintillation decay time, may be found. A particular advantage of this method is that stochastic fluctuations of events in the scintillation counter may be neglected. These fluctuations give the multiplier output pulse a very irregular profile and are analysed in detail using statistical generating function.