An effective digital pulse processing method for pile-up pulses in decay studies of short-lived nuclei

With the charged-particle decay spectroscopy extended to the proton drip-line region, half-lives of nuclei of interest decrease rapidly. Consequently, severe signal piling-up resulting from the implanted ions and their successive decays in position sensitive detectors become more and more common. To extract the spectroscopic information from the pile-up pulses with good accuracy, a digital pulse analysis algorithm is presented in this paper and validated with the α decay of 219Th and the internal conversion electron decays of 210,211Ra isomers, all of which have ∼ μs half-lives. The results show that with proper baseline correction, standard pulse construction and plateau-region fitting etc., the spectroscopic information of overlapping signals with time separation down to 80 ns and amplitude of individual pile-up pulse down to 70 keV, can be readily extracted.