A time-of-flight correction procedure for fast-timing data of recoils with varying implantation positions at a spectrometer focal plane
Mallaburn, M. J., Singh, B. S. N., Cullen, D. M., Hodge, D., Taylor, M. J., Giles, M. M., . . . Smolen, M. (2019). A time-of-flight correction procedure for fast-timing data of recoils with varying implantation positions at a spectrometer focal plane. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, 933, 18-29. doi:10.1016/j.nima.2019.04.019
Authors
Date
2019Copyright
© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
Fast-timing measurements at the focal plane of a separator can suffer from poor timing resolution. This is due to
the variations in time-of-flight (ToF) for photons travelling to a given detector, which arise from the changes in the
implantation positions of the recoil nuclei emitting the γ rays of interest. In order to minimise these effects on timing
measurements, a procedure is presented that improves fast-timing data by performing ToF corrections on an event-by-event
basis. This method was used to correct data collected with an array of eight LaBr3 detectors, which detected γ rays
from spatially distributed 138Gd recoil-implants at the focal plane of the Recoil-Ion-Transport-Unit (RITU) spectrometer.
The Generalised Centroid Difference (GCD) method was used to extract a lifetime from data in conjunction with a new
procedure to calibrate the time walk. The lifetime of the first 2+ state in 138Gd, populated by the decay of the Kπ = 8−
isomeric state, was measured to be 229(24) ps using the ToF-corrected data, which is consistent within three standard
deviations to the literature value. The results together with Monte-Carlo simulations show that the ToF correction
procedure reduced the uncertainty in the measured lifetimes by 3 % in the case of the spatially distributed nuclei at the
focal plane of RITU. However, ∼12 % has been estimated for a similar experiment when using a larger focal plane i.e. the
Super-FRS at the FAIR facility.
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