Photometric Error Analysis. IX: Optimum Use of Photomultipliers

A critical study of photomultipliers leads to the following conclusions: (1) the dark current observed in tubes with alkali-antimonide cathodes at room temperature is primarily due to gas ions, not thermionic emission; (2) deviation from idealized (simple Poisson) pulse-height distributions is primarily due to secondary electron loss, particularly in venetian blind multipliers; (3) pulse-counting provides better signal-to-noise ratio than any other simple detection scheme, and is not far from optimum detection in most cases. However, dc methods can approach pulse-counting quite closely if digital readout is used. A convenient method for determining optimum discriminator levels is presented, with examples.