Improved Amplitude and Rise Time Compensated Timing with Ge Detectors

The energy range over which signal timing can be made nearly independent of amplitude and rise time has been extended downward by about an order of magnitude by employing dual priming of a zero crossing discriminator. By introducing another coarsely compensated timer between the high resolution timer and its priming leading edge discriminator, one can optimize the timing accuracy without sacrifice of dynamic range. Time walk of less than 1 ns has been achieved from about 20 keV to over 1 MeV.