New paper published on analyzing and mitigating pulse-pile-up artifacts in PFRC-2 plasma x-ray spectra

A new paper,Analysis and Mitigation of Pulse-Pile-Up Artifacts in Plasma
Pulse-Height X-ray Spectra
” by Taosif Ahsan and our team has been published open-access in MDPI Plasma. It describes the implementation of an algorithm, the two-photon trapezoidal uncorrelated-pulse model, to improve analysis of x-ray spectra emitted from PFRC-2 plasma. This model was developed to reduce artifacts in x-ray spectra caused by pulse pile-up, PPU (the phenomenon where x-ray photons are recorded nearly simultaneously so that only one x-ray photon is recorded with a combined energy), and diagnose the tail region to see if it is a pulse-pile-up artifact or if it has physical origins.

Four scenarios are shown to illustrate pulse pile-up. The top left plot has two trapezoidal pulses overlapping close enough so that the registered peak (energy) is the addition of the peaks of the individual pulses. The bottom right plot is a case where the individual peaks are detected and so pulse pile-up is not an issue. The top right and bottom left plots are in-between cases where there is enough overlap to result in a combined pulse with an intermediate energy recorded. This figure is described in the published paper.
More figures from the published paper showing the successful mitigation of pulse pile-up using the model derived in the paper.

Experiments on the Princeton Field-Reversed-Configuration (PFRC-2) device explore nearly pure, ca. 99%, partially ionized, warm hydrogen plasmas. For these, great interest lies in the tails of the X-ray spectrum. The tail region is important as an electron temperature in the PFRC can be estimated by fitting a Maxwellian distribution. Small tails of high-energy electrons in the energy distribution (EED), even comprising less than 1% of the plasma density, can have large effects on the resistivity, stability, and reaction rates of the plasma.

This paper is a step toward understanding how PPU affects the tail region of spectra for detector-formed trapezoidal pulses. Here we focus on relatively low count rate (≤0.1/deadtime) spectra where primarily only two-photon pile-up needs to be considered. Extension of this work to multi-photon pile-up will be necessary to develop an analytical tool to diagnose and mitigate pile-up effects in the tail regions of higher count-rate spectra.

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