Scintillator and PMTs
Posted: Thu May 17, 2012 10:20 pm
I have been messing around with the Harshaw crystal and the PMT some. Got a socket and wired up the divider but I am just not getting any pulses out from the pmt. It does respond to light. I cut a tiny slit in the black tape I wrapped around it and saw a voltage change in response to the light level but not sensitive enough to pick up the scintillator pulses. I used the basic design from here, but using 10 meg and 5 meg resistors:
http://es1.ph.man.ac.uk/AJM2/e2e/hardware/hardware.htm
So to see if the scintillator is any good I strapped it to one of the little Hamamatsu HC120 PMT units I have. That definitely showed pulses. Hooked it to a counter and got 400 cpm background and when I sat a piece of U ore on it got 21500 CPM. But considering it is just looking though a tiny little 4*13mm window and not even using any optical coupling that is not that bad.
This is the basic data sheet for the PMT module, the difference being they are a custom version with a side looking window instead of edge.
http://sales.hamamatsu.com/assets/pdf/p ... series.pdf
Scintillator on PMT by macona, on Flickr
http://es1.ph.man.ac.uk/AJM2/e2e/hardware/hardware.htm
So to see if the scintillator is any good I strapped it to one of the little Hamamatsu HC120 PMT units I have. That definitely showed pulses. Hooked it to a counter and got 400 cpm background and when I sat a piece of U ore on it got 21500 CPM. But considering it is just looking though a tiny little 4*13mm window and not even using any optical coupling that is not that bad.
This is the basic data sheet for the PMT module, the difference being they are a custom version with a side looking window instead of edge.
http://sales.hamamatsu.com/assets/pdf/p ... series.pdf
Scintillator on PMT by macona, on Flickr