Abstract
Pair production is an important photon interaction process at high energies. Its observation at photon energies available in an undergraduate laboratory is limited by the small cross section above the production threshold at 1022keV. Several experimental arrangements have been used to study pair production in targets using the photons emitted by radioactive sources. The complexity of these setups is difficult to reproduce in the undergraduate laboratory, because they use high-activity radioactive sources or complex targets and collimation systems. This note presents a simple experimental setup for observing pair production using standard radioactive gamma sources available in the undergraduate laboratory. The dependence of the production cross section on atomic number is extracted and compared with tabulated values by using different target materials.
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