Speaker
Description
Monte Carlo methods to model radiation transport are now extensively used to model detector efficiency and response for space radiation sensors. Often, the modeling efforts focus on the response of the sensor to isotropic or unidirectional fluxes at low to moderate counting rates. This is acceptable for situations where the design requirements of the sensor allow it to be operated in these near ideal circumstances. With the advent of space radiation sensors being developed for a variety of applications as well as platforms this simplified approach to assessing the performance of a detector on orbit may be not sufficient. This is because almost all sensors rely upon sensitive analog and digital electronics to take and interpret data from these sensors. These signal chains can behave in non-ideal manners due to effects such as dead-time, pulse pile-up, and accidental coincidences. Those behaviors are often analyzed for single sensors and then effects are approximated for complex systems such as multi-element particle telescopes. However, with the advent of large memory depth signal generators it has become possible to develop pulse sequences that can stimulate these signal chains to better understand departures from ideal behavior. Our current efforts underway to go from Monte-Carlo simulation of the detector interaction all the way to pulse sequences for stimulation of the signal chains for multi-element coincidence based particle telescopes are described.
