Rare isotope discoveries with digital electronics

The discovery of the new isotopes 109Xe and 105Te was enabled by the application of a new experimental method using selective pulse shape storage from silicon detectors with digital signal processing electronics. Essential data processing algorithms were developed, which are able to find unique nuclear decay signatures, such as overlapping alpha decay induced signals. An experiment using this method led to the simultaneous detection of isotopes with dramatically different half lives T1/2(109Xe) = 13(2) ms and T1/2(105Te) = 620(70) ns. The ground state decay energies have been measured to be E(109Xe) = 4062(7) keV and E(105Te) = 4703(5) keV via observation of correlated events in the decay chain 109Xe → 105Te → 101Sn.