Digitised charged-particle discrimination in CsI detector signals

Sammanfattning: This work is aimed at improving the discrimination of protons and α particles in digitised signals from CsI(Tl) scintillators. This has been achieved using pulse-shape discrimination, wherein the shape of the pulses is used to learn which particle is detected. Two primary methods have been implemented and compared, namely, the charge-comparison method where the ratio between the integrals of two different regions of the pulse is calculated, and the cosine similarity measure which indicates the similarity to a reference pulse. The work has demonstrated improvements of up to 20 % in certain detector elements over the pre-existing method which utilised a simple version of the charge-comparison method. In the future, it may be beneficial to explore machine learning algorithms to further improve and automate the discrimination process.