Stability and Performance Characteristics of a Digital Positron Lifetime Spectrometer

We summarize the setup and performance tests of a digital positron lifetime spectrometer presently in routine use at HUT/Laboratory of Physics. The performance of the spectrometer is found to be equal to or better than that of an analog spectrometer with similar detectors. We present also results on measuring the stability of the system, which is found to be similar to that of analog spectrometers: variation in the time-zero of the spectrometer is found to be ≈10 ps/week. We suggest that the remaining instabilities of the spectrometers originate primarily from the detectors.