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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:

  1. Sarcastic title? This technology certainly does exist...

    ReplyDelete
  2. It certainly does not exist. Care for a reference ?

    Igor

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  3. 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

    ReplyDelete
  4. David,

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

    Cheers,

    Igor.

    ReplyDelete