Small Prototype Gamma Spectrometer Using CsI(Tl) Scintillator Coupled to a Solid-State Photomultiplier

This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by IEEE-Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and can be found at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=23.\ud (c) 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Small solid-state photomultipliers (SSPMs) are an alternative scintillator light-detection technology to traditional photomultiplier tubes that offer advantages such as lower bias voltages and insensitivity to magnetic fields. A digital spectrometer using a commercially available SSPM was constructed and characterized at Oregon State University as a prototype for small, highly-mobile, low-power, robust spectroscopy devices. The SSPM has over 19,000 microcells in a photo-sensitive area of 6.32 x 6.32 mm and was coupled to 6 x 6 x 10 mm reflectively-coated CsI(Tl) crystals. The rest of the spectrometer consists of a fast preamplifier and 200 MHz, 12-bit digital pulse processor based around a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The efficiency, resolution, linearity, and peak-to-Compton ratio of the system were characterized