An electronic processing system for cosmic X-ray event analysis

Abstract

An electronic logic system has been developed to evaluate and process X-ray events in 20-100 keY energy range from multi-cell xenon filled proportional counters used in X-ray astronomy. The electronic system consists of X-ray event selection logic, pulse height analyzer, K-fluorescent gating and arrival time tagging. Using "K-fluorescent gating technique", improved energy resolution for incident X-ray energies above 34 keV is achieved. The X-ray event selection logic is designed to obtain higher background rejection efficiency for charged particles and Compton events. It provides significant advantage in studying weak cosmic X-ray sources as well as detecting spectral line features in the field of hard X-ray spectroscopy from balloon-borne telescope. The telemetry system used is formatting the event location and digitized energy information with a dead time of 1.28 ms. To reduce the dead time of the system, buffer memories are used with proper time tagging.