Single-photon elimination in liquid scintillation counting with pulse shape discrimination and delayed coincidence

Liquid scintillation counting is widely used in the rapid measurement of beta activity in environmental and biological samples. However, the single-photons generated by chemiluminescence and photoluminescence in liquid scintillation cocktails seriously affect the measurement accuracy of low-energy beta activity. A novel method based on the combination of the signal characteristic analysis and selective gate to eliminate the single-photon signal was developed. A preprocessing circuit made of a fast response time photomultiplier tube (PMT, Hamamatsu R9420), two charge-sensitive preamplifiers (CSP), two comparators, an analog switch and delay-line devices were designed and developed to verify the feasibility and effectiveness. The output signals from the last dynode were characterized in the pulse time and were used to discriminate the beta signals from the single-photon ones. The beta signals were “tagged” through pulse width detection, pulse width-amplitude transform and pulse-height discrimination with the first comparator, the first CSP and the second comparator. The “tagged” beta signal were applied to control the analog switch. The anode signals were specially delayed and then selected by the analog switch to achieve the single-photon signal elimination. Liquid scintillation cocktails containing ${}^{14}C$ or NaOH used as beta or single-photon sources were provided to verify the feasibility of the principle. The results showed that the typical fall time of the single-photon and beta signal was 16.05 ns and 43.17 ns. The single-photon rejection ratio is 2.76 × 10${}^{-3}$ ± 3.89 × 10${}^{-5}$, and the detection efficiency is up to $93.02\text{\%}\pm 0.59\text{\%}$.