Quantitative Compton suppression spectrometry at elevated counting rates

Abstract

For quantitative Compton suppression spectrometry the decrease of coincidence efficiency with counting rate should be made negligible to avoid a virtual increase of relative peak areas of coincident isomeric transitions with counting rate. To that aim, a separate amplifier and discriminator has been used for each of the eight segments of the active shield of a new well-type Compton suppression spectrometer, together with an optimized, minimum dead-time design of the anticoincidence logic circuitry. Chance coincidence losses in the Compton suppression spectrometer are corrected instrumentally by comparing the chance coincidence rate to the counting rate of the germanium detector in a pulse-counting Busy circuit (G.P. Westphal, J. Rad. Chem. 179 (1994) 55) which is combined with the spectrometer’s LFC counting loss correction system. The normally not observable chance coincidence rate is reconstructed from the rates of germanium detector and scintillation detector in an auxiliary coincidence unit, after the destruction of true coincidence by delaying one of the coincidence partners. Quantitative system response has been tested in two-source measurements with a fixed reference source of 60Co of 14 kc/s, and various samples of 137Cs, up to aggregate counting rates of 180 kc/s for the well-type detector, and more than 1400 kc/s for the BGO shield. In these measurements, the net peak areas of the 1173.3 keV line of 60Co remained constant at typical values of 37 000 with and 95 000 without Compton suppression, with maximum deviations from the average of less than 1.5%.