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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Position-sensitive proportional counter with low-resistance metal-wire anode

Patent ·
OSTI ID:5152638

A position-sensitive proportional counter circuit is provided which uses a conventional (low-resistance, metal-wire anode) proportional counter for spatial resolution of an ionizing event along the anode of the counther. A pair of specially designed activecapacitance preamplifiers terminate the anode ends wherein the anode is treated as an RC line. The preamplifiers act as stabilized active capacitance loads and each is composed of a series-feedback, lownoise amplifier, a unity-gain, shunt-feedback amplifier whose output is connected through a feedback capacitor to the series-feedback amplifier input. The stabilized capacitance loading of the anode allows distributed RC-line position encoding and subsequent time difference decoding by sensing the difference in rise times of pulses at te anode ends where the difference is primarily in response to the distributed capacitance along the anode. This allows the use of lower resistance wire anodes for spatial radiation detection which simplifies the counter construction and handling of the anodes, and stabilizes the anode resistivity at high count rates (> 10/sup 6/ counts/sec).

Assignee:
Dept. of Energy
Patent Number(s):
US 4197462
OSTI ID:
5152638
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English