Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Development of an energy and efficiency calibration method for stilbene scintillators

  • Kim, Chanho (Department of Bio-Convergence Engineering, Korea University) ;
  • Kim, Jaehyo (Department of Energy Systems Engineering, Seoul National University) ;
  • Hong, Wooseong (Department of Energy Systems Engineering, Seoul National University) ;
  • Yeom, Jung-Yeol (Department of Bio-Convergence Engineering, Korea University) ;
  • Kim, Geehyun (Department of Energy Systems Engineering, Seoul National University)
  • Received : 2022.03.08
  • Accepted : 2022.06.16
  • Published : 2022.10.25
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Abstract

A method for calibrating the energy scale and detection efficiency of stilbene scintillators is presented herein. This method can be used to quantitatively analyze the Compton continuum of gamma-ray spectra obtained using such scintillators. First, channel-energy calibration was conducted by fitting a semi-empirical equation for the Compton continuum to the acquired energy spectrum and a new method to evaluate the intrinsic detection efficiency, called intrinsic Compton efficiency, of stilbene scintillators was proposed. The validity of this method was verified by changing experimental conditions such as the number of sources being measured simultaneously and the detector-source distance. According to the energy calibration, the standard error for the estimated Compton edge position was ±1.56 keV. The comparison of the intrinsic Compton efficiencies calculated from the single- and two-source spectra showed that the mean absolute difference and the mean absolute percentage difference are 0.031 %p and 0.557%, respectively, demonstrating reasonable accuracy of this method. The feasibility of the method was confirmed for an energy range of 0.5-1.5 MeV, showing that stilbene scintillators can be used to quantitatively analyze gamma rays in mixed-radiation fields.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) (2017M2A8A4017932, NRF-2018R1D1A1A02048400, and NRF-2020R1A2C2007376), and Korea Environmental Industry & Technology Institute (KEITI) through Subsurface Environment Management (SEM) Project, funded by Korea Ministry of Environment (MOE) (2018002440004).

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