Dead time and pileup in pulsed parametric X-ray spectroscopy

Spectroscopy of parametric X-rays (PXR) from pulsed electron sources is usually done with very low electron beam currents in order to avoid dead time losses and pileup problems. This paper presents a method that allows correction of dead time losses and pileup in pulsed X-ray spectroscopy. Such correction is required in order to study the variation of PXR production and linewidth with increased electron beam currents. The method presented here uses the observed integrated count rate in a PXR peak and the total count rate to obtain the dead time and pileup corrected rates. The method also allows treatment of pulse pileup from a first-order reflection to a second-order reflection and can be extended to higher order reflections. Application of the theory to measured data is demonstrated and corrections of up to a factor of four are demonstrated. The method described in this paper can be applied to any pulsed spectrum measurement and is not specific to PXR, which was used here for comparison of the theory to experiments.