CRITICAL COMPARISON OF PHOTON COUNTING AND DIRECT-CURRENT MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES FOR QUANTITATIVE SPECTROMETRIC METHODS
CRITICAL COMPARISON OF PHOTON COUNTING AND DIRECT-CURRENT MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES FOR QUANTITATIVE SPECTROMETRIC METHODS
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DOI:
10.1021/ac60312a020
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发表时间:
1972-01-01
影响因子:
7.4
通讯作者:
CROUCH, SR
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
INGLE, JD;CROUCH, SR
A comparison of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) expressions for spectrometric measurements using photon counting and direct current techniques reveals that photon counting techniques provide SNR’s from 5 to 22% higher under equivalent conditions if measure-ments are shot noise limited. If measurements are limited by source or background flicker noise, both techniques provide equivalent SNR’s. However, dc techniques are capable of measuring light levels several orders of magnitude greater than can be measured without pulse pileup in photon counting. Practical implications for analytical spectrometric methods are discussed, and criteria are presented for choosing the detection technique providing the highest SNR.Photon counting has been proposed as a measurement tech-nique for several analytical spectrometric applications (1-5). These are several reasons why photon counting techniques appear to have inherent advantages over the conventional dc method of measuring light intensity. First, radiant flux in-formation is processed in a discrete manner, reducing the num-ber of domain conversions (6) necessary to obtain a number related to the incident light level. Second, the processing of information by digital circuity makes photon counting detec-tion less susceptible to long term drift and 1//noise which often limits analog systems. This feature enables the spectrome-trist to utilize much longer averaging times than would be feasible with dc detection where low frequency noise com-ponents can predominate at narrow measurement system bandwidths. Other advantages of the photon counting tech-nique include the ability to discriminate against photomulti-plier dark current originating down the dynode chain and the virtual elimination of the reading error which can limit analog