Christian H. Herden's research while affiliated with Technische Universität Braunschweig and other places

... Nowadays PCs have reached the performance to process and store data of a PAC experiment and to process them in real-time as conventional spectrometers do. A new generation TDPAC spectrometer has already been designed possessing many novel features [1,2]. In a conventional PAC setup, the number of detectors cannot be increased without an enormous increase in the complexity of the apparatus. ...

... The picture of our present work-horse spectrometer ( Fig. 2) could as well have been taken 50 years ago, since only the detector crystals and the computerized electronics 11 have changed. ...

... A month later the transmission was confirmed with a new set of voltages and with stable, laser-ionized Cu ions. Then the first short-lived radioactive beam of 68m Cu (T 1/2 = 3.75 min) was taken to the sample holder mounted inside a quartz finger collection chamber set up at the central station, shown in Fig. 4. Using the PAC technique with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) [17] and List mode digital set- ups [18], and four high resolution LaBr 3 gamma detectors in a plane array perpendicular to the beam direction, the appropriate cascade (intermediate state of 7.84 ns half-life, 84 keV and I = 2 + ) could be resolved leading to the first ever on-line (and off-line) PAC experiment performed on a Cu isotope. Several PAC time spectra were obtained by implantation into Ni and Co foils using continuous measurement, aimed at probing the magnetic interactions . ...