IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 59, NO.

2, APRIL 2012 281

High Voltage Power Supply With High Output

Current and Low Power Consumption for
Photomultiplier Tubes
José Paulo V. S. Cunha, Member, IEEE, Marcia Begalli, and Maria Dias Bellar, Member, IEEE

Abstract—In some applications, photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) gether with the high costs of some types of PMTs, have
are powered by battery based circuits, where the available energy is suggested studies about reusing them. Even big experiments
severely limited. The most simple approach to design high voltage such as those of KamLAND [7] in Japan, MiniBOONE [8]
power supplies (HVPS) for PMTs has considered resistive voltage
dividers in order to bias the dynodes. However, this approach usu- at Fermilab, have reused PMTs from previous experiments
ally results in high power losses and, consequently, this undermines (SuperKamiokande, for KamLAND, and LSND for Mini-
the PMT performance. In this work, the proposed solution is the BOONE). Often, commercially available bases are unsuitable
use of a power circuit based on the forward converter connected for old PMTs. Therefore, in this work a HVPS design is pro-
to a transformer built with several secondary windings. Each sec- posed by taking into account the possibility to apply it to an old
ondary voltage is rectified and filtered to eliminate voltage ripple.
Each dynode voltage is supplied by a rectified secondary voltage. type of PMT setup, which can be reused in some equipment or
The proposed topology provides low power consumption as well as experiment where portability is also welcome.
low sensitivity of the PMT gain with respect to the dynode currents. PMTs usually operate at high voltage levels around 1 kV.
Taking into account the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equip- As pointed out by [9], when the PMT average anode current
ment Directive (WEEE), this HVPS has been designed to allow the (which depends on the rate and amplitude of light pulses) in-
recycling of old PMTs.
creases, the dynode voltages become redistributed and, as a re-
Index Terms—High voltage, low power, photomultiplier, photo- sult, the gain changes. Therefore, a careful design of the high
multiplier base, photomultiplier tube (PMT), power supply. voltage power supply is essential, not only to provide the re-
quired voltage levels to the dynodes of the PMT with reduced
I. INTRODUCTION power losses, but also to make the PMT operate with low gain
sensitivity in spite of dynode current variations.
Several design approaches for PMT HVPS can be found in

P HOTOMULTIPLIER TUBEs (PMTs) are versatile de-

vices adopted in several applications such as: pollution
monitoring [1]; aerospace and astrophysics experiments [2];
the literature. They are reviewed in the Appendix for a better
understanding on the motivation to propose the base design of
this paper. The characteristics of the bases are compared, spe-
high-energy physics [3], [4]; area monitors designed to contin- cially in terms of regulation of the dynode voltages and power
uously measure changes in environmental radiation levels; oil consumption.
well logging; neutrino experiments; cosmic ray detection [5]; The most simple approach to design PMT bases has been a
laser radars applied in atmospheric measurement for highly single HVPS connected to a resistive voltage divider in order
accurate range finding; aerosol scattering detection or even to bias the dynodes [10, pp. 270–274], [11]. However, this ap-
counter-terrorism and field inspection [6]. Sometimes PMTs are proach usually results in high power losses and, consequently,
used in places where the access to electrical energy is limited, this undermines the PMT performance. High power losses are
or they are needed to be portable. In these cases, low voltage usual since the current through the voltage divider must be kept
battery based circuits are required and, energy consumption much larger than the average anode current [10, p. 272].
should be kept as low as possible. This paper proposes a high voltage power supply (HVPS)
The national laws that have been encouraged by the Waste based on a DC/DC converter connected to a transformer built
Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE), to- with several secondary windings in Section III, considering
the specifications described in Section II. Each secondary
Manuscript received June 09, 2011; revised October 08, 2011; accepted voltage is rectified and filtered to eliminate voltage ripple.
November 19, 2011. Date of publication January 23, 2012; date of current Dynode voltages are supplied by the rectified voltages. The
version April 13, 2012. This work was supported in part by CNPq and FAPERJ, proposed topology provides low power consumption as well
Brazil.
J. P. V. S. Cunha and M. D. Bellar are with the Department of Electronics as low sensitivity of the PMT gain with respect to the dynode
and Telecommunication Engineering, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio currents, as shown in the experiments described in Section IV
de Janeiro 20550-013, Brazil (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]). and discussed in Section V.
M. Begalli is with Department of Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Physics
Institute, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro 20550-013, Brazil
(e-mail: [email protected]). II. BASIC DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. In this work a PMT of type VA-S-968 (from VEB RFT Mes-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TNS.2011.2179558 selektronik, Dresden, Germany) was used. Some basic design
0018-9499/$31.00 © 2012 IEEE
282 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 59, NO. 2, APRIL 2012

Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the proposed forward converter base.

guidelines were adopted as described next. A maximum 1500 V input voltage . Each secondary voltage is related to by
regulated and adjustable voltage is provided at the output of the the turns ratio, which must be selected to obtain the specified
HVPS. The available input voltage is . The output interstage voltage. The input voltage controls the output
voltage must be remotely adjusted in order to achieve the desired voltage, since the duty ratio is kept constant.
current gain. Furthermore, the output voltage telemetry is in- Each transformer primary winding has 12 turns and a center
cluded for self-test and monitoring purposes. A regulator circuit tap, as indicated in Fig. 1, such that when the output of the
maintains the output voltage of the HVPS at the desired level. voltage regulator is maximum , 1 V is applied to
Small recovery time (few milliseconds) of the dynode voltages each turn. The number of turns of all secondary windings are
after intense light pulses is also required. It must be stressed also presented in Fig. 1. The total number of turns of the sec-
that the PMT interstage voltages must be kept insensitive to the ondary is 1513, such that the desired maximum voltage (1500 V)
dynode currents in order to keep the gain of the PMT constant. can be reached, provided that the power supply voltage satisfies
. A standard ferrite EE core has been used.
III. PROPOSED BASE During the conduction cycle of Q1 the transformer core is
The proposed base, presented in Fig. 1, applies a modified magnetized. The demagnetizing circuit composed of D14 and
forward converter [12, Sec. 7.1]. When the MOSFET Q1 turns a tertiary (demagnetizing) transformer winding requires at least
on, the transformer primary voltage is equal to the converter the same time of the conduction cycle to reduce the transformer
CUNHA et al.: HIGH VOLTAGE POWER SUPPLY WITH HIGH OUTPUT CURRENT AND LOW POWER CONSUMPTION FOR PMTs 283

Fig. 2. Equivalent circuit of a forward converter with a single output voltage.

magnetic flux to zero [12, Sec. 7.1.2]. Therefore, Q1 operates at The resistances R1–R26 must be large enough to reduce
a duty ratio . Since there exists a small leakage in- power losses. Therefore, the use of these passive networks
ductance between the primary and the tertiary windings, when results in poor damping. In order to reduce undesirable oscil-
Q1 turns off, the energy stored in this leakage inductance is dis- lations and to keep power losses at acceptable levels, an active
sipated in the avalanche breakdown of the intrinsic body-diode oscillation damping procedure was developed. This is carried
in the IRFD110 MOSFET. out by the MOSFET driver in Fig. 1. The active damping
The time constant of each RC filter pair at the HVPS outputs strategy can be explained by considering the simplified equiv-
( s, ) is chosen to give an alent circuit of the forward converter in Fig. 2. The following
acceptable voltage ripple [12, see Example 3.1]: main assumptions are considered in this model:
(A1) the forward converter has a single output;
(1) (A2) the parasitic capacitances in the transformer windings
are lumped in the single capacitance Cs;
which gives , since the switching frequency (A3) the power losses in the transformer can be modeled
is and . One must note that the voltage by Rs and,
ripple may increase due to the load current. (A4) the primary and tertiary transformer windings are
perfectly coupled such that these can be represented by a
A. High Voltage Regulation single primary winding.
Assumptions (A1) and (A4) allow the use of the -model for
The high voltage is regulated by a feedback control loop de- the transformer inductances. Assumption (A1) may look too ex-
scribed as follows. The photocathode voltage is measured by the aggerated as a modeling simplification, however the model of a
high voltage sensor circuit, which is an inverter attenuator com- transformer with several secondary windings would be too com-
posed of an operational amplifier IC2, R29 and R30, chosen to plex and is not needed to understand the detailed performance
provide 0.0033 voltage gain. The zener diode D15 protects the of the actual converter.
amplifier from possible high voltage discharges. The measured The waveforms of the square-wave signal and of the pe-
voltage is compared to the reference voltage by the operational riodic pulse generated by the MOSFET driver circuit are
amplifier IC3. The MOSFET Q2 is the output element of this shown in Figs. 3(a) and 3(b), respectively. When is low
linear series regulator. The input capacitor C27 of the forward (0 V), Q1 is in the off state. When is high ( 12 V), the
converter provides a path for high frequency currents due to the MOSFET capacitances Cgs and Cgd charge through resistor
converter switchings. This voltage regulator is a lag compen- R34. When the gate voltage becomes larger than the MOSFET
sator with a stable pole near the origin and a zero with time threshold voltage, Q1 enters the active region and the feedback
constant s, chosen equal to to cancel the pole capacitance Cgs integrates the current that flows through R34.
introduced by the discharge of each RC filter pair at the HVPS While Q1 operates in the active region, the drain voltage wave-
outputs. The pole near the origin results in a large DC voltage form (Fig. 3(c)) is a ramp falling down to 0 V, which is reflected
gain needed to improve the closed-loop voltage regulation. in the secondary voltage displayed in Fig. 3(d). Finally Q1
becomes saturated, which is reinforced by the delayed pulse
B. Active Oscillation Damping
which charges Cgs and Cgd through R35 such that the MOSFET
The influence of parasitic capacitances is significant since the on resistance becomes small . The soft tran-
transformer secondary windings have 1513 turns and the pri- sition between the off and on states attenuates the oscillations
mary winding has only 12 turns. Undesirable oscillations caused due to parasitics in the transformer, which are absent in the
by inductances and parasitic capacitances in the transformer are positive plateau of (see Fig. 3(d)). This plateau provides a
damped by resistors R1–R26. The two RC filter networks also stiff voltage that improves the voltage regulation of the rectifier
eliminate inductive effects in the connection cable between the stage.
PMT and the HVPS (see Fig. 1). One filter is the resistor base in- When becomes low, Cgs and Cgd are discharged through
stalled in the PMT socket (R1–R13 and C1–C13) and the other D17 in order to turn off Q1 abruptly. Large oscillations occur,
is near the rectifier stage (R14–R26 and C14–C26). Moreover, as seen in Fig. 3(d), which are acceptable since becomes
these resistors provide discharge paths for the filter capacitors. negative and, consequently, the rectifier diode Dr is reverse bi-
If the HVPS is installed near the PMT, then the connection cable ased avoiding undesirable effects in the output voltage . This
and the network R14–R26 and C14–C26 can be eliminated. abrupt turn-off is convenient to reduce power losses, since the
284 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 59, NO. 2, APRIL 2012

Fig. 4. Simulated transformer secondary voltage in Fig. 2 without active

damping (R34 = 10 k
and v (t) 
0 V ).

Fig. 5. Simulated output voltage in Fig. 2 when a load resistance is connected

(t  1 ms).

since (unloaded) drops to (12.9%)

when the load is connected.

C. Design Considerations for Low Power Consumption

Fig. 3. Simulation results obtained with the forward converter presented in
Fig. 2. Signals generated by the MOSFET driver: (a) v ; (b) v ; (c) drain With the purpose of mitigating power consumption, all the
to source voltage in Q1 (v ); (d) transformer secondary voltage (v ). devices were chosen with reduced loss characteristics:
1) The operational amplifier LMC6041 was selected since
this device demands less than 0.21 mW from the power
transformer magnetizing current is large during this transition. supply;
Of course, a soft turn off would reduce the undesirable oscilla- 2) The Schottky diode D14 and the power MOSFET Q1 were
tions at the cost of large power losses. chosen to reduce conduction losses, since the transformer
To evaluate the importance of active damping, consider the magnetizing current that flows through these devices is
simulated secondary voltage shown in Fig. 4 obtained for the large (several milliamperes);
circuit in Fig. 2 without active damping ( and 3) The square-wave oscillator and the MOSFET driver cir-
). The smaller resistance of R34 makes Q1 turn on cuits are based on low power CMOS logic. Low capac-
faster, which causes oscillations when is positive (see Fig. 4). itances (some pico farads) and large resistances (several
These oscillations deteriorate the performance of the rectifier kilo ohms) were applied to reduce conduction and losses
stage. In contrast, active damping eliminates such oscillations in these circuits;
which are absent in Fig. 3(d). This influences the open loop 4) The square-wave oscillator frequency
regulation of the output voltage as can be seen in Fig. 5. For the was chosen experimentally in view of the trade-off be-
actively damped circuit, the DC output voltage tween power consumption and voltage regulation. The
drops to (0.83%) when a 40 load resistance amplitudes of the currents in the transformer primary and
(which sinks 1 mA) is connected to the output . The tertiary windings and, consequently, conduction losses
voltage regulation for the poorly damped circuit is unacceptable, are reduced as the switching frequency becomes higher.
CUNHA et al.: HIGH VOLTAGE POWER SUPPLY WITH HIGH OUTPUT CURRENT AND LOW POWER CONSUMPTION FOR PMTs 285

Fig. 6. Voltage pulse applied to the reference LED (upper trace) and output
signal of the PMT (lower trace). The central output pulse is generated by the Fig. 7. Measured relative gain of the PMT as a function of the average anode
reference LED. The other pulses are generated by the second LED. current. The lines serve only to guide the eyes.

However, the damping of undesirable oscillations is less length should be kept as small as possible to reduce the cable
effective at higher switching frequencies, thus, voltage impedance and induced noise, thus preventing the degradation
regulation may be improved as the switching frequency is of the performance of the PMT. However, the voltage drop in
reduced. the connection cable can be neglected in longer cables, provided
The power required by each circuit block is: the resistances of the cable wires are small and the decoupling
mW square-wave oscillator MOSFET driver capacitances C1–C13 (in Fig. 1) are large enough to maintain
mW voltage regulator mW high voltage sensor their voltages constant during current pulses in the PMT.
mW resistor base mW damping resistors
mW forward converter mW, which is the V. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
total power measured when the photocathode is maintained in Fig. 7 shows the sensitivity of the PMT gain to the average
the dark and kV (Fig. 1). The magnetizing current anode current. The performances of the proposed base and con-
and the parasitics in the transformer are responsible for most ventional resistor bases indicated in Fig. 1 powered by a single
of the power losses in the forward converter. The power losses conventional HVPS are compared. Resistor base 1 is built with
in the series voltage regulator are proportional to the current , ,
fed to the forward converter. Therefore, the design of more and , which has power consumption higher than
efficient forward converter and transformer is the key point to 1.17 W, according to (2) in Appendix A. Resistor base 2 is built
the reduction of the total power consumption of this forward with the resistance values indicated in Fig. 1, which has much
converter base. lower power consumption (11.7 mW in the dark). When ampli-
Moreover, the HVPS can be turned off by the logic tude of the light pulses produced by the second LED is small,
signal (Fig. 1) to save power ( 1 mW). the average anode current is negligible , hence the
PMT gain is almost independent of the average anode current.
IV. EXPERIMENTS This corresponds to 100% relative gain. The PMT bias volt-
In order to measure the variation of the gain of the PMT ages are sensitive to the dynode and the anode average cur-
due to the deviation of dynode voltages, an experimental setup rents. Therefore, the PMT gain varies as the average anode cur-
was built where the PMT and two blue light emitting diodes rent increases. Such sensitivity of the PMT gain is small for
(LEDs) were kept in a dark chamber. One LED receives a con- the forward converter base. On the other hand, the sensitivity
stant voltage pulse (1 s, 10 Hz, upper trace in Fig. 6), which of the PMT gain is more evident for the conventional resistor
is taken as the reference for the measurement of the PMT gain. bases which have their performances degenerated at very low
The second LED receives periodic pulses with fixed duration anode currents ( in the case of the resistor base 2 and
(1.33 s), fixed frequency (100 kHz) and adjustable amplitude, in the case of the resistor base 1), as it can be seen in
which causes the variation of the average anode current. A 50 Fig. 7.
resistive load was connected through a coaxial cable (0.65 m The maximum power consumption of the forward converter
length) to the PMT anode, which produces the output voltage is 760 mW when the photocathode is permanently illuminated
signal (lower trace in Fig. 6). The amplitude of the output refer- such that the anode current is 5 mA DC. The minimum power
ence pulse measured when the second LED is permanently off consumption is 295 mW when the photocathode is kept in the
is taken as the reference for the relative gain 100%. During the dark. The main characteristics of this prototype are summarized
experiments, the output voltage of the HVPS was maintained at in Table I.
1200 V by the regulator. The expected performances of the forward converter base
The PMT is housed inside a tubular magnetic shield to elim- presented here and of the Cockcroft-Walton base may be
inate the influence of magnetic fields and to allow the instal- somewhat similar. Probably, lower power consumption can
lation of the HVPS near the PMT, if needed. The length of be achieved with Cockcroft-Walton bases [3], [13], [14]. The
the cable that connects the HVPS and the PMT is 1.7 m. This required transformer has a single secondary winding with
286 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 59, NO. 2, APRIL 2012

TABLE I
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PROTOTYPE HVPS

Fig. 8. Resistor base for a nine-dynode PMT.

cally zero. Under this operating condition, the power dissipated

in the resistor base is minimum and given by
small turns ratio, which reduces parasitics and, consequently,
reduces power losses in the transformer. Unfortunately, the
Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier does not enable the precise
(2)
adjustment of the PMT, since all the interdynode voltages are
divisible by the minimal multiplied voltage [9]. Therefore, the
development of a Cockcroft-Walton base for this PMT would where is the voltage between the PMT anode and photo-
be complicated, since the nominal interstage voltages are dif- cathode, is the -th resistor value, and is the number of
ferent: 183 V between the photocathode and the first dynode, resistors in the voltage divider ( in Fig. 8).
57 V between the first and second dynodes, 40 V between the In order to illustrate the power loss, the resistor base
last dynode and the anode and, 10 122 V for the remaining shown in Fig. 8 [15] is considered. In this example, if
dynodes, when . A simple design exercise then is approximately 5.4 W, which
which disregards the forward voltage drops in the diodes would is much larger than the peak pulsed power dissipated in the load
consider a transformer with secondary peak voltage equal to mW according to the experiments
20 V. In this example, a Cockcroft-Walton rectifier with 75 reported loc. cit.. High power losses are usual since the current
stages to generate all of the voltages for biasing this PMT through the voltage divider must be kept much larger than the
is required. This design approach results average anode current [10, p. 272].
in higher number of stages than that needed by the forward The decoupling capacitors in Fig. 8 are placed in the stages of
converter base. Moreover, all of the voltages would be approx- the voltage divider near the anode with the purpose of keeping
imated to integer multiples of 20 V in this Cockcroft-Walton these latter dynode voltages at constant values, in spite of the
base, which leads to errors up to 3 V. On the other hand, the regular occurrence of current pulses [10, p. 272].
transformer in the forward converter base can be designed to Resistor bases have been considered for application in the
achieve better voltage tolerances. Pierre Auger Observatory [5]. The surface array of detectors in
The design of PMT bases can be simplified by using resistive this observatory is composed of 1600 Cherenkov water tanks
voltage dividers to supply the desired (arbitrary) voltages to the equipped with three PMTs in each tank. Since the power for
low current dynodes as is usually done in booster and transistor each surface detector is supplied by solar panels and batteries,
bases (see Appendices B and C). Therefore the number of stages the PMT bases have to fulfill stringent constraints on power
in Cockcroft-Walton bases as well as the number of rectifiers in consumption. The total power consumption of one PMT base
the proposed base can be reduced. and associated HVPS must be limited to 500 mW [5]. The re-
sistor base adopted in [5] applies large resistances to reduce
VI. CONCLUSION power loss. Large decoupling capacitors maintain a constant
PMT gain. Indeed the main limitation of this approach is the
A new high voltage power supply (HVPS) topology for PMTs
long recovery time after the detection of high energy events.
is proposed. The main features of this topology are low power
After these events, the decoupling capacitors may loose charge
consumption, low sensitivity of the PMT gain to the average
enough to reduce significantly the PMT gain. The recovery time
anode current and capability of operation at high average anode
of the desired dynode voltages is governed by the time constants
currents. The proposed HVPS is composed of a non-dissipative
of the voltage divider, which are large in view of the large ca-
voltage divider based on a multi-winding transformer, a forward
pacitances and resistances adopted in [5].
converter, and a closed-loop voltage regulator. Experimental re-
sults have confirmed that the forward converter HVPS provides B. Booster Base
low power consumption and lower PMT gain sensitivity with
respect to the anode current, when compared to the gain sensi- An early reference that applies a booster base is [16]. The
tivity obtained with resistor bases. They also show the viability last dynodes of the booster base are powered by independent
of recycling old PMTs. HVPSs, i.e., HV8 and HV9 as illustrated in Fig. 9. These reg-
ulated power supplies maintain the voltages of the last dynodes
APPENDIX at constant values even at large anode average current levels.
PHOTOMULTIPLIER BASES The upper limit of the output current depends on the maximum
current of the HVPSs [11]. The dynodes near the photocathode
A. Resistor Base need low average currents for normal operation, therefore these
Consider the resistor base shown in Fig. 8. When the photo- dynodes may be biased by a resistive voltage divider with small
cathode is maintained in the dark, the anode current is practi- power dissipation as in [4].
CUNHA et al.: HIGH VOLTAGE POWER SUPPLY WITH HIGH OUTPUT CURRENT AND LOW POWER CONSUMPTION FOR PMTs 287

Fig. 11. Diagram of a Cockcroft-Walton base.

Fig. 9. Generic booster base.

the PMT gain changes about 10% when a rectangular pulse of

amplitude 8 mA and 500 s duration and 120 Hz repetition rate
is obtained in the anode of the PMT [18]. It is worth noticing that
in this operating condition the average anode current is 0.48 mA,
i.e., half of the current supplied by the HVPS to the PMT base.
This transistor base is only applicable to low duty cycle situa-
tions, since a decoupling capacitor must be recharged between
Fig. 10. Simplified diagram of a transistor base.
large pulses.
An interesting alternative to reduce the dependence of the
The booster base can be designed to require much less power
gain of the PMT on the average anode current is to replace each
at high average anode current operation than in the case of a
transistor by a pair of PNP transistors connected in the Dar-
resistor base. When the photocathode is in the dark, the power
lington configuration [9], due to its large current gain.
dissipated is minimum and given by
The bases proposed in [19] apply high voltage field effect
transistors (FETs). The FET PMT bases are similar to the
(3)
bipolar transistor PMT bases. The most advantageous feature
of the P channel FET base is the low bias drain current, which
where is the voltage of the HVPS connected to the -th can be kept small since the FET gate requires negligible bias
dynode and is the number of resistors in the booster current. The reported bias current of the PMT base is 20 ,
base voltage divider ( in Fig. 9). The booster base is therefore mW kV when the pho-
expected to be more expensive than other bases, since it requires tocathode is maintained in the dark. The gain of the PMT is
more power supplies or voltage regulators. kept constant for average anode currents up to 100 , which
C. Transistor Base demands 120 mW kV from the HVPS.

In the base proposed in [17], the dynodes near the anode are D. Cockcroft-Walton Base
biased through bipolar transistors, as can be seen in Fig. 10 [11]. Fig. 11 presents a PMT base composed of a Cockcroft-Walton
The emitter follower characteristics of high beta transistors pro- cascade rectifier and an AC oscillator [11], [13]. The Cock-
vide stiff voltage sources for the last dynodes. If the average croft-Walton base does not require a DC HVPS, but an AC oscil-
currents in dynodes 8 and 9 are small, then most of the current lator. This type of circuit has the advantage of dissipating much
in the resistors R1–R7 circulates through the transistors. If the less power than a resistor base or a transistor base, since capaci-
average currents in dynodes 8 and 9 are large, then the currents tors are non-dissipative devices and power losses in the rectifier
in the emitters of the transistors are reduced and flow into the diodes are small. The reported power consumption of the Cock-
corresponding dynodes. croft-Walton base in [20] is 40 mW when the photocathode is
By considering that the current in the resistive voltage divider maintained in the dark. Another advantage is that large average
must be larger than the maximum admissible average current in anode currents can be provided. In the experiments described in
the dynode 9, an estimation for the minimum power dissipated [13], the PMT gain was kept constant for average anode currents
in the transistor base satisfies ranging from 0 to 2 mA. These features motivated the applica-
tion of the Cockcroft-Walton base in the spacecraft described in
(4) [2]. The low power dissipation of the Cockcroft-Walton base
has been convenient for an electromagnetic calorimeter with
where is the maximum admissible average anode cur- densely packed PMTs [3], since in this case heat dissipation was
rent, is the voltage between the ground and the -th dynode an important issue.
and is the number of resistors in the transistor base A limitation of the scheme proposed in [13] is that all the
voltage divider ( in Fig. 10). Thus it can be concluded that interstage voltages are equal to the peak-to-peak voltage of the
the power consumption of the transistor base is smaller than the oscillator, which may be unsuitable for PMTs which require dif-
power required by a resistor base of similar performance, since ferent interstage voltages. The Cockcroft-Walton base proposed
the current through the resistor base is several times greater than in [20] combines several rectifier stages such that different inter-
. stage voltages are obtained, provided that all interstage voltages
The transistor base proposed in [18] applies PNP transistors are integer multiples of the the peak-to-peak voltage of the os-
and zener diodes for improved voltage regulation. At the nom- cillator.
inal voltage kV the current supplied to this base is 1 An interesting approach to reduce power consumption is the
mA, which results in 2 W power consumption. It is reported that resonant converter Cockcroft-Walton base developed by [21].
288 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 59, NO. 2, APRIL 2012

Resonant converters can be designed to reduce power losses [12, [5] B. Genolini, M. Aglietta, A. Creusot, W. Fulgione, F. Gomez, I.
Chapter 9], such that the power consumption is around 80 mW Lhenry-Yvon, C. Morello, G. Navarra, T. N. Trung, J. Pouthas,
T. Suomijärvi, and C. Vigorito, “Low power high dynamic range
as reported in [21]. However, that base was designed for low photomultiplier bases for the surface detectors of the Pierre Auger
average anode currents (1 ). It was reported that the voltage observatory,” Nucl. Instrum. Meth. Phys. Res. Sect. A Accelerators,
between the last dynode and anode drops almost 10% when the Spectrometers, Detectors, Associated Equipment, vol. 504, no. 1–3,
pp. 240–244, May 2003.
average current is around 41 [21, Fig. 5], which may cause [6] D. Katsis, D. Burns, S. Henriquez, S. Howell, and M. Litz, “Develop-
significant gain variations in the PMT. The poor voltage regu- ment of a wireless radioactive material sensor network,” Nucl. Instrum.
lation of the Cockcroft-Walton rectifier in sinusoidal operation, Meth. Phys. Res. Sect. A Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors, Asso-
ciated Equipment, vol. 652, no. 1, pp. 94–98, Oct. 2011.
such as in that resonant converter, is well known [22]. [7] Buzenitz et al., KamLAND US Collaboration, Mar. 1999, Proposal for
A problem of Cockcroft-Walton rectifiers is the dependency US Participation in KamLAND, [Online]. Available: http://bama.ua.
of the capacitor voltages response to abrupt load changes on the edu/~andreas/ps_files/kamland_prop.pdf
[8] Church et al., Dec. 1997, A Proposal for an Experiment to Measure e
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