Semi-empirical simulation of in-motion radiation detection systems

Abstract

The Replicative Assessment of Spectroscopic Equipment (RASE) is an open-source software that uses experimental data as the basis to simulate the response of commercial radiation detectors to sources in various situations, particularly in the context of nuclear security and safeguards applications. Dynamic RASE introduces the capability to simulate scenarios where sources and detector are in relative motion. Position-dependent experimentally acquired gamma spectra are ingested by Dynamic RASE to build maps that describe the detector response over all space. These response maps are used to replicate the time-dependent energy spectra collected as sources move on a path near the detector. A Gaussian process is used to build each map, incorporating a novel kernel adapted to the special case of radiation detection. The approach has been validated against experimental data acquired using a NaI-based detector for 137Cs and 54Mn sources. The capability to create accurate simulations using either long-dwell static measurements or dynamic pass-by measurements as source data has been demonstrated. Quantitative relative performance, benefits, and shortcomings are discussed.