Rare isotope discoveries with digital electronics

The discovery of the new isotopes Xe-109 and Te-105 was enabled by the application of a new experimental method using selective pulse shape storage from silicon detectors with digital signal processing electronics. Essential data processing algorithms were developed, which are able to find unique nuclear decay signatures, such as overlapping alpha decay induced signals. An experiment using this method led to the simultaneous detection of isotopes with dramatically different half lives T-1/2(Xe-109) = 13(2) ms and T-1/2(Te-105) = 620(70) ns. The ground state decay energies have been measured to be E-alpha(Xe-109) = 4062(7) keV and E-alpha(Te-105) = 4703(5) keV via observation of correlated events in the decay chain Xe-109, Te-105 Sn-101. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.