Monte Carlo simulation of the full energy peak efficiency of an HPGe detector

Waseem Khan; Qingmin Zhang; Chaohui He; Muhammad Saleh

doi:10.1016/j.apradiso.2017.11.018

Monte Carlo simulation of the full energy peak efficiency of an HPGe detector

Appl Radiat Isot. 2018 Jan:131:67-70. doi: 10.1016/j.apradiso.2017.11.018. Epub 2017 Nov 15.

Authors

Waseem Khan¹, Qingmin Zhang², Chaohui He¹, Muhammad Saleh³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Nuclear Science and Technology, School of Energy and Power Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China.
² Department of Nuclear Science and Technology, School of Energy and Power Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China. Electronic address: zhangqingmin@mail.xjtu.edu.cn.
³ Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS), Islamabad 45650, Pakistan.

PMID: 29173810
DOI: 10.1016/j.apradiso.2017.11.018

Abstract

This paper presents a Monte Carlo method to obtain the full energy peak efficiency (FEPE) curve for a High Purity Germanium (HPGe) detector, as it is difficult and time-consuming to measure the FEPE curve experimentally. The Geant4 simulation toolkit was adopted to establish a detector model since detector specifications provided by the nominal manufacturer are usually insufficient to calculate the accurate efficiency of a detector. Several detector parameters were optimized. FEPE curves for a given HPGe detectors over the energy range of 59.50-1836keV were obtained and showed good agreements with those measured experimentally. FEPE dependences on detector parameters and source-detector distances were investigated. A best agreement with experimental result was achieved for a certain detector geometry and source-detector distance.

Keywords: Gamma-ray spectrometry; Geant4; HPGe detector.