Pulse shape discriminations of different types of radiation on GGAG imaging detector

Abstract

Gd3(GaAl)5O12:Ce (GGAG) is a ceramic scintillator originally developed for X-ray CT, and it was also an excellent material for the development of an event-by-event-based radiation imaging detector when it was combined with a position sensitive photomultiplier (PSPMT). With the developed GGAG imaging detector, we found that the decay times for alpha particles and gamma photons were different. Also, we found that the decay times for alpha particles and beta particles were different. These characteristics are advantageous for developing an imaging detector for the simultaneous imaging of different types of radiation using pulse shape discrimination. Thus, we tested the separation of the images of the alpha particles and gamma photons using pulse shape discrimination. Also, we evaluated the separation of the alpha and beta particle images. In the pulse shape spectra, we could separate the peaks of Am-241 alpha particles and Cs-137 gamma photons with a peak-to-valley ratio (P/V) of 3.5. We obtained clearly separated images for Am-241 alpha particles and Cs-137 gamma photons using pulse shape discrimination. We could also separate the peaks of Am-241 alpha particles and Sr–Y-90 beta particles with a P/V of 1.5 in the pulse shape spectrum. We obtained separated images for Am-241 alpha particles and Sr–Y-90 beta particles using pulse shape discrimination. In addition, we could separate electrostatically collected natural alpha particles, Po-218 and Po-214, from the environmental beta particles and gamma photons using pulse shape discrimination. We conclude that the GGAG imaging detector is promising for simultaneous imaging and separating the images of different types of radiation using pulse shape discrimination.