Characteristics of High-Rate Energy Spectroscopy Systems with Time-Invariant Filters

The effects of shaping time, energy level, and input count rate upon energy resolution, peak shift, and unpiledup output rate are presented for a representative set of germanium (Ge) spectrometer systems. The shaping amplifiers for each spectrometer incorporated semi-Gaussian time-invariant filters. Resoltion data for input count rates from 103 counts per second to greater than the maximum unpiled-up output rate are presented for each spectrometer. The resolution data presented for low energies (6keV), and medium and high energies (> 1MeV) should allow an experi-. menter to estimate the trade-offs between the conflicting requirements for resolution and output count rate for different types of Ge spectrometers.