Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Efficiency calibration and coincidence summing correction for a NaI(Tl) spherical detector

  • Noureddine, Salam F. (Physics Department, Faculty of Science, Lebanese University) ;
  • Abbas, Mahmoud I. (Physics Department, Faculty of Science, Alexandria University) ;
  • Badawi, Mohamed S. (Physics Department, Faculty of Science, Alexandria University)
  • Received : 2020.07.16
  • Accepted : 2021.04.13
  • Published : 2021.10.25
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Abstract

Spherical NaI(Tl) detectors are used in gamma-ray spectrometry, where the gamma emissions come from the nuclei with energies in the range from a few keV up to 10 MeV. A spherical detector is aimed to give a good response to photons, which depends on their direction of travel concerning the detector center. Some distortions in the response of a gamma-ray detector with a different geometry can occur because of the non-uniform position of the source from the detector surface. The present work describes the calibration of a NaI(Tl) spherical detector using both an experimental technique and a numerical simulation method (NSM). The NSM is based on an efficiency transfer method (ETM, calculating the effective solid angle, the total efficiency, and the full-energy peak efficiency). Besides, there is a high probability for a source-to-detector distance less than 15 cm to have pulse coincidence summing (CS), which may occur when two successive photons of different energies from the same source are detected within a very short response time. Therefore, γ-γ ray CS factors are calculated numerically for a 152Eu radioactive cylindrical source. The CS factors obtained are applied to correct the measured efficiency values for the radioactive volumetric source at different energies. The results show a good agreement between the NSM and the experimental values (after correction with the CS factors).

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work has been done in the frame of a scientific collaboration between the Physics Department, Faculty of Science, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt, and the Physics Department, Faculty of Science, Lebanese University, Beirut, Lebanon. The authors highly appreciate the Lebanese University for financial support and are thankful to Dr. Ayman Hamzawy and Dr. Abouzeid A. Thabet for their fruitful discussions.

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