AN INEXPENSIVE MULTICHANNEL SCALER FOR MOSSBAUER EXPERIMENT WITH SIMULTANEOUS DISPLAY

A completely stand-alone multichannel scaler system which can be easily built using commercially available integrated circuits is described. The multichannel scaler is interfaced to an 8-bit Intel-8085 based microcomputer through a peripheral interface adapter (PIA) Intel 8255. The inherent data latching property of PIA is made use of in the present study. The multiscaler interface system developed has decided advantages: it displays 1024 channels simultaneously, needs no attention of the microprocessor during data acquisition, has less hardware complexity, irrespective of the kind of microprocessor chosen, and has a minimal dead time (approximately 2%) and triple precision storage. Further, the method of Mössbauer data acquisition described in our note results in a higher rate of collection and subsequent lower rate of processing.