Digital pulse processing simulations in MATLAB and OCTAVE for nuclear spectroscopy

Conventionally the pulse processing and the data acquisition systems in nuclear spectroscopy have been based on the front-end NIM based analog shaping and timing amplifiers followed by ADC and subsequent interfacing and storage protocols/systems. Recently novel systems based on the Digital Signal Processing concepts are been extensively used in in-beam experiments. These systems provide a compact and self-contained pulse-processing and histograming components. In a DSP based systems, the pre-amplifier signal from the detector is directly digitized by a fast flash ADC and is then processed completely in the digital domain. Thus allowing for a compete numerical analysis of the detector pulse signals. Hence, the numerical algorithms replace conventional pulse circuitry. The current work investigates the different recursive algorithms used for pulse shaping in DSP systems. A digital pulse processor computes the pulse height out from the data sampled by a fast and high-resolution ADC. The post-processing setup involves streaming of the sampled ADC data into real-time processors usually implemented in FPGAs. They continuously perform pileup inspection and precompute arrival times and pulse heights using filters such as trapezoidal, triangular to name a few