Comparison of time corrections using charge amounts, peak values, slew rates, and signal widths in leading-edge discriminators

Leading-edge discriminators (LEDs) are one of the prominent discriminator technologies used in time-of-flight systems due to their simplicity, but they have large time walks such that the measured time should be corrected using amplitude information. In this article, we analyze off-line time corrections using four kinds of amplitude parameters, namely, peak values, slew rates, and signal widths, as well as charge amounts. For these corrections, we developed the front-end electronics (FEE) that can measure these amplitude parameters and performed time measurements with the developed FEE in an amplitude range of about 20 dB for various threshold conditions, which are the only adjustment in LEDs. Then, we off-line corrected the measured time using the amplitude parameters mentioned above and compared the corrected efficiencies by the used parameters and threshold conditions.