Measurement methods of ionization current and electric charges in radiation dosimetry

Abstract This paper deals with the problem of measurement of very low direct currents and electrical charges in dosimetric application. It describes the known and used methods of measurement: the current method, the charge method, and the null method. A new method, which is presented here, is a combination of the two latter methods. The new method is compared with the known methods of measurement and the results of this comparison are summarized and discussed. The new method allows achieving relative standard uncertainty of 0.003% for current measurements around 3 pA and a long term stability of about 0.01%. Apart from this, preliminary measurements by using a built in comparator were also performed. Therefore, the uncertainty budget of the measurements for the system without an external comparator was also taken into account in the paper. The combined measurement uncertainties for current measurements obtained for the above-mentioned two methods (the new method and the method with the comparator built in the 6517A Keithley electrometer used in our experiments) were similar.