Control system and automation of the spectrum acquisition for a perturbed gamma-gamma angular correlation spectrometer

This work reports results from the automation of data acquisition for a gamma-gamma perturbed angular correlation (PAC) spectrometer located in the hyperfine interactions laboratory (LIH) of IPEN. A PAC spectrometer comprises usually four scintillation detectors (BaF₃). Basically, the time difference between the detection of any two gamma emitted rays (of the probe nuclei) incident on any two spectrometer detectors is recorded. Depending on the conditions, the probe nuclei occupies certain sites of a crystalline lattice or a macromolecule where it is intended to study the electrical and / or magnetic characteristics of the medium in the areas of condensed or biophysical matter physics. In order to perform this work, the Java language was used because it is a multiplatform and object-oriented programming language, thus having portability and longer software life and due to the ease of implementation of the peripherals. Finally, the software has a friendly and intuitive interface with the user being able to operate the hardware manually or automatically with time acquisitions up to 100 consecutive hours. In automatic mode, the software sets the temperature (controller) previously set by the user, awaits stability, processes the acquisition, and records the data in different files (for different temperatures) before each acquisition. In addition, the software also saves to a file all relevant parameter information during acquisition. (author)