Operating a microchannel plate ( MCP ) in saturated mode provides a simple photon and particle counting detector. However, there is a finite recovery time after individual events during which individual microchannels no longer respond, reducing the overall sensitivity. At continuous high flux levels, the corrections from measured to true flux become increasingly large as the fraction of live microchannels rapidly decays to low values. Gating the flux arriving at the MCP greatly increases the proportion of live microchannels allowing periodic measurements to be made that accommodate high fluxes and associated low errors. Such improvements have been observed in a neutral particle analyzer on the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak. A simple analytical treatment accounts for the measured improvements.
