A New Statistical Approach for Digital Triggering of Events From Radiation Detectors

A fully digital trigger technique is presented. It is based on evaluating the occurrence or the absence of an event on a statistical basis. This allows very low-level discrimination for isolated events as well as high time resolving capabilities, i.e., double event discrimination, provided that the events are sufficiently energetic. These two conflicting requirements are met by using a single processing architecture. The theory of the underlying optimum filter and a less resource-hungry processor are carried out and their relative performance compared. Self-calibration and self-optimization of the algorithm with respect to the actual noise conditions have also been implemented. The user can easily adapt to his/her requirements the balance between false triggering reduction, low-level discrimination, and multiple event rejection