I was taking a course in electronics. Scintillation counters, Dynodes, Channeltrons are some of the common names in counting elementary particles. When I entered an XPS lab, I saw "Detector used: PSD 128 bit". Do the modern day XP spectrometers not using Dynodes/Channeltrons anymore?
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$\begingroup$ Vocabulary is part of the problem. For instance a "dynode" is one part of a detector (usually a PMT in this context) not a detector in and of itself. And scitillation counters go by multiple names and generally involve a secondary detector as well as the scintillator itself. And "Channeltron" is a trademark of a particular company; the generic name is "electron multiplier". Aside from the vocabulary issues technology improves over time. For instance PMTs are still around and are used whee they are the right thing, but silicon devices have taken over some of the roles that PMTs used to play. $\endgroup$– dmckee --- ex-moderator kittenCommented Jan 17, 2018 at 3:22
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A PSD is a position-sensitive detector. Probably channelplates as electron multipliers with a resistive anode behind it to measure the resistivity of the pulse.
This makes measurement faster: a range of positions (energies) is measured in parallel in stead of the single signal from a channeltron.