Section 3.3.8.10. Recording detector livetime

The detector deadtime is often more a function of the counting electronics than of the intrinsic properties of the detector. In these circumstances, the counting circuit may provide a gating signal that indicates when the electronics are processing an event versus when the circuit is idle and waiting for an event to process. From this gating signal, a detector livetime signal can be generated. Livetime is a better way to correct intensities than applying a deadtime correction, because if appreciable numbers of events are processed but are not counted (for example, counts due to fluor­escence), the actual deadtime can be quite high, even though the recorded number of counts can be quite low. To use the livetime signal, the count time can be multiplied by the livetime or the livetime can be treated as a monitor (see Section 3.3.8.9). If an incident-intensity monitor and a livetime are both available, the _pd_meas_intensity_monitor value can contain the incident intensity times the livetime.