Effective dead time in pulse counting systems

Dead time corrections in particle counting systems are important for quantitative analysis. It is often not appreciated, however, that these corrections depend on the experiment performed. For surface analysis systems using a stationary beam and a steady counting rate from a spectrometer with single particle detecting electronics, the dead time corrections lead to the simple equations discussed in our earlier work. These concepts translate very directly into SIMS and AES systems with rastered beams and SIMS, XPS and AES systems with multidetectors, to use the same equations, but with area average and multidetector dead times, respectively. The relations of these dead times to the original electronic dead time are presented here.