Sunday, July 18, 2010

CS: These Technologies Do Not Exist: Time Modulated Photo-Multiplier Tubes

As an addendum to yesterday's entry on Compressive MultiChannel Analyzers, one couldd also think of a way to do some type of time multiplexing of the Photo-Multiplier Tubes (PMT). The multiplexing could be performed by oscillating resistances between the dynodes or by modulating the power supply of the PMT..



Why would you want to have a technology like this one ? At the very least it could provide some rapid detection of abnormal events from a steady state background. This modulation could also be undertaken in concert with a modulation of the Random Anger Coding Scheme or the Random X-ray Collector mentioned earlier.

This entry will be added to the "These Technologies Do Not Exist" page.

4 comments:

David said...

Sarcastic title? This technology certainly does exist...

Igor said...

It certainly does not exist. Care for a reference ?

Igor

David said...

Hi Igor,

Sorry, didn't mean to sound condescending, and maybe I misunderstand the proposal.

If this was a passive detection would it not be described as an analogue lock-in amplifier?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock-in_amplifier

Or if active, a heterodyne or homodyne detection scheme?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodyne_detection

Our community routinely uses active non-linear detection with PMTs to measure phase and amplitude of time-modulated photon density waves in biological tissues. For example:

http://www.lrsm.upenn.edu/pmi/papers/AGYgroup/XingdeLi/YYang97OptEng36.pdf

http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/1.1331561

David

Igor said...

David,

Thank you very much. I need to read on this further. Can you contact me by e-mail ?

Cheers,

Igor.

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