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Data from: Label-free timing analysis of SiPM-based modularized detectors with physics-constrained deep learning

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Oct 25, 2023 version files 1 GB

Abstract

Pulse timing is an important topic in nuclear instrumentation, with far-reaching applications from high energy physics to radiation imaging. While high-speed analog-to-digital converters become more and more developed and accessible, their potential uses and merits in nuclear detector signal processing are still uncertain, partially due to associated timing algorithms which are not fully understood and utilized.

In the paper "Label-free timing analysis of SiPM-based modularized detectors with physics-constrained deep learning", we propose a novel method based on deep learning for timing analysis of modularized detectors without explicit needs of labelling event data. By taking advantage of the intrinsic time correlations, a label-free loss function with a specially designed regularizer is formed to supervise the training of neural networks towards a meaningful and accurate mapping function. We mathematically demonstrate the existence of the optimal function desired by the method, and give a systematic algorithm for training and calibration of the model. The proposed method is validated on two experimental datasets based on silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) as main transducers:

  1. In the toy experiment, we collect data from a pair of SiPM sensors from a common laser source. The neural network model achieves the single-channel time resolution of 8.8 ps and exhibits robustness against concept drift in the dataset. 
  2. In the electromagnetic calorimeter experiment, we collect data from an eight-channel calorimeter module. Several neural network models (Fully-Connected, Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short Term Memory) are tested to show their conformance to the underlying physical constraint and to judge their performance against traditional methods. 

In total, the proposed method works well in either ideal or noisy experimental condition and recovers the time information from waveform samples successfully and precisely. The dataset in this repository serves as a basis for similar researches on timing performance of SiPM-based nuclear detectors, and on application of neural networks to typical signals of nuclear radiation detectors.