A radiation counter that consists of a scintillator (see scintillation), photomultiplier, amplifier, and scaler and is used to measure the activity of a radioactive source. The scintillator crystal emits flashes of light of a characteristic frequency when exposed to gamma rays from a radioactive source. Each scintillation produces an output pulse from the photomultiplier. The count rate produced from the photomultiplier is measured and the activity of the source calculated.
The scintillation counter is energy-dependent since the frequency of the emitted light in dependent on the energy of the incident radiation. The energy of the electrons emitted from the photocathode is a function of the light frequency and hence pulses produced by radiation of energy other than that being considered may be excluded using a suitable discriminator circuit. The signal-to-noise ratio is therefore improved relative to other radiation counters, such as the Geiger counter, since background radiation and scattered radiation may be excluded, and one radioactive nuclide may be counted in the presence of another.
The energy dependence of a scintillation counter may also be used to study the energy distribution of radioactive nuclides, thus using it as a scintillation spectrometer.