2016/11/30 by Benjamin A Lucas, Lucas, Benjamin A
Engineering · Mathematics · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced MRI Techniques and Applications #Advanced X-ray and CT Imaging #Computational physics #Detector #Mathematics #Medical Imaging Techniques and Applications #Monte Carlo method #Optics #Photon #Photon counting #Physics #Poisson distribution #Quantum mechanics #Spectroscopy #Statistics #physics.ins-det
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1612.00039
arxiv created 2016/11/30 · openalex publication_date 2016/11/30 · arxiv updated 2016/12/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
The effective bandwidth of an energy dispersive x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy system is limited by the timing of incident photons. When multiple photons strike the detector within the processing time of the detector photon pile-up occurs and the signal received by the detector during this interval must be ignored. In conventional ED-XRF systems the probability of a photon being incident upon the detector is uniform over time, and thus pile-up follows Poisson statistics. In this paper we present a mathematical treatment of the relationship between photon timing statistics and the count rate of an XRF system. We show that it is possible to increase the maximum count rates by applying feedback from the detector to the x-ray source to alter the timing statistics of photon emission. Monte-Carlo simulations, show that this technique can increase the maximum count rate of an XRF spectroscopy system by a factor of 2.94 under certain circumstances.