High rate diffusion-scale approximation for counters with extendable dead time

Measuring occurrence times of random events, aimed to determine the statistical properties of the governing stochastic process, is a basic topic in science and engineering, and has been the subject of numerous mathematical modeling approaches. Often, true statistical properties deviate from measured properties due to the so called dead time phenomenon, where for a certain time period following detection, the detection system is not operational. Understanding the dead time effect is especially important in radiation measurements, often characterized by high count rates and a non-reducible detector dead time (originating in the physics of particle detection). The effect of dead time can be interpreted as a suitable rarefied sequence of the original time sequence. This paper provides a limit theorem for a high rate (diffusion-scale) counter with extendable (Type II) dead time, where the underlying counting process is a renewal process with finite second moment for the inter-event distribution. The results are very general, in the sense that they refer to a general inter arrival time and a random dead time with general distribution. Following the theoretical results, we will demonstrate the applicability of the results in three applications: serially connected components, multiplicity counting and measurements of aerosol spatial distribution.