A 5 ns-64 Channel Photon Counter

Abstract

For measurements of luminescence decays, a simple multichannel photon counter has been designed and constructed by use of conventional ECL logic circuits. The photon pulses of luminescence decays are temporarily stored in 64-bit shift registers with a time resolution of 5 or 10 ns and accumulated. The decay curves are efficiently measured in time sharing over the time range from 0 to 81.2 μs when the resolution of 5 ns is selected. The maximum repetition times and the maximum repetition rates are 65536 times and 20 starts/s, respectively. The instrument is aided by a personal computer and much available for measurements of luminescence decays having a decay time of around 100 ns. Also, a wide variety of applications should be found in luminescence spectroscopy. The performance has been shown by measurements of light pulses from a light emitting diode.