Time resolution studies using digital constant fraction discrimination

Digital Pulse Processing (DPP) modules are being increasingly considered to replace modular analog electronics in medium-scale nuclear physics experiments (100–1000s of channels). One major area remains, however, where it has not been convincingly demonstrated that DPP modules are competitive with their analog predecessors—time-of-arrival measurement. While analog discriminators and time-to-amplitude converters can readily achieve coincidence time resolutions in the 300–500 ps range with suitably fast scintillators and Photomultiplier Tubes (PMTs), this capability has not been widely demonstrated with DPPs. Some concern has been expressed, in fact, that such time resolutions are attainable with the 10 ns sampling times that are presently commonly available.In this work, we present time-coincidence measurements taken using a commercially available DPP (the Pixie-4 from XIA LLC) directly coupled to pairs of fast PMTs mated with either LSO or LaBr3 scintillator crystals and excited by 22Na γ-ray emissions. Our results, 886 ps for LSO and 576 ps for LaBr3, while not matching the best literature results using analog electronics, are already well below 1 ns and fully adequate for a wide variety of experiments. These results are shown not to be limited by the DPPs themselves, which achieved 57 ps time resolution using a pulser, but are degraded in part both by the somewhat limited number of photoelectrons we collected and by a sub-optimum choice of PMT. Analysis further suggests that increasing the sampling speed would further improve performance. We therefore conclude that DPP time-of-arrival resolution is already adequate to supplant analog processing in many applications and that further improvements could be achieved with only modest efforts.