Fast signal processing of a yttrium–aluminum–perovskite:Ce detector for synchrotron x-ray experiments

An amplifier has been developed to form narrow pulses of less than 100 ns for a YAP:Ce scintillator, which appears promising as a detector for high-counting rate x-ray measurements. The performance of the detector system has been evaluated with monochromatic 8, 16.5, and 25 keV synchrotron x-ray photons at the Photon Factory. The whole deadtime obtained was 84 ns, which is around 3.5 times the decay time of the scintillation (25 ns), indicating that the present system is almost optimum. It has been found that the counting loss for 1 M counts/s is only 8%–9%, and that the detector can count extremely strong photons up to 5 M counts/s.