Digital pulse shape analysis in nuclear physics experiments with intermediate energy heavy ions

This thesis work concerns the developments in the field of pulse shape analysis of detector signals to perform particle identification in nuclear physics experiments. Using Sampling ADC it is possible to collect pulse shapes and extract the physic related information using algorithms devoted to pulse shape analysis. A Data Acquisition System based on digital pulse shape acquisition and the analysis algorithms devoted to particle discrimination was designed and developed to study and test with ad hoc software the digital particle identification methods. The possibility to sample the pulse shape of signals from detectors offers additional and more detailed information on particle interactions. In this way it is possible: to extracts the Fast and the Slow components of the CsI(Tl) and BaF2 scintillation light; to obtain good timing performances from different detectors; to measure the Silicon rise time to be used for pulse shape discrimination and to study timing and particle identification in the new LaBr3 detectors. The time measurements using silicon detectors, and scintillators were widely investigate, in particular it was studied an exhaustive study of the digital timing performances of scintillators by varying the sampling frequency was made for BaF2 and LaBr3 detectors. This work shows that using digital pulse shape acquisition and analysis it is possible to obtain good results in particle discrimination usually better than using traditional methods.