Signal Processing for Radiation Detectors

Preface

Ionizing radiation is widely used in various applications in our modern life, including but not limited to medical and biomedical imaging, nuclear power industry, environmental monitoring, industrial process control, nuclear safeguard, homeland security, oil and gas exploration, space research, materials science research, and nuclear and particle physics research. Radiation detectors are essential in such systems by producing output electric signals whenever radiation interacts with the detectors. The output signals carry information on the incident radiation and, thus, must be properly processed to extract the information of interest. This requires a good knowledge of the characteristics of radiation detectors’ output signals and their processing techniques. This book aims to address this need by (i) providing a comprehensive description of output signals from various types of radiation detectors, (ii) giving an overview of the basic electronics concepts required to understand pulse processing techniques (iii), focusing on the fundamental concepts without getting too much in technical details, and (iv) covering a wide range of applications so that readers from different disciplines can benefit from it. The book is useful for researchers, engineers, and graduate students working in disciplines such as nuclear engineering and physics, environmental and biomedical engineering, medical physics, and radiological science, and it can be also used in a course to educate students ...