A photostimulation method for the study of pile-up and dead time effects in nuclear devices equipped with solid state detectors

Characterization of energetic particle spectrometers with respect to the pile-up and the dead time effects is a crucial task to eliminate systematic errors during processing of the data registered by the device. The task is of importance especially for particle spectrometers to be flown aboard space probes, since the dynamic range of the particle flux intensity is very wide and there is a problem to set an optimal geometrical factor to avoid countrate overloading on one hand and low statistics on the other. Extended characterization “in advance” can significantly improve the quality of the acquired data processing. With respect to limitations of electrical and radioisotope stimulation a practical method is proposed by photostimulation pulses with programmable (pseudo) random time and energy distribution—to simulate natural processes with a significant level of confidence.