Discrimination of non-radiation backgrounds in the proportional counter of MARDS

The Movable 37Ar Rapid Detection System (MARDS) was developed by the Institute of Nuclear Physics and Chemistry of the China Academy of Engineering Physics in 2006 for on-site inspections under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It is a small and portable system that can quickly acquire data at suspected nuclear test sites. In this work, digital pulse shape discrimination (PSD) was used to process data from test samples to reduce electronic noise. The experimental results demonstrate that PSD combined with principal component analysis can classify and reject many noise sources. Thus, the threshold for the signal can be set low, expanding MARDS valid data acquisition capability, especially in very low-level and low-energy counting situations.