Measuring Energy of X-Rays using a Scintillation Detector

Vineeth Krishna T(DTP),Aritra Kumar Gon(DTP), Md Zahid Ansari(DTP),Jagannath Das(DTP)

September 2019

1 AIM moving electron then excites other electrons in the

crystal before decaying back to the ground state.
To calibrate a scintillation counter and measure en- Since the incoming photon is absorbed completely,
ergy of X-Rays from an unknown source and charac- the amplitude of the luminescent pulses of light
terize the non-linearity of the scintillation counter. corresponding to this process carry the information
of the energy (frequency) of the incoming radiation.
2 THEORY (ii) Compton Scattering:
In this process, the photon scatters with an electron
Scintillation detectors are one of the common instru- in the crystal, transferring some kinetic energy to it
ments used to detect the energy spectrum of ionizing and the photon changes direction and loses energy
radiation like X-rays. They are used in wide range corresponding to the recoil of the electron. From
of fields from high energy physics research to medi- the theory of Compton scattering we know that
cal applications (for imaging). As the name suggests there is a maximum limit for the amount of energy
these detectors use scintillators, which are materials gained by the recoiling electron, therefore, this
that exhibit the property of luminescence (scintilla- process creates pulses with different amplitudes but
tion) when excited by ionizing radiation. The scin- with a maximum cutoff value (Compton edge).
tillator used in our experiment is a CeBr3 crystal.
The Ce3+ ions in the crystal exhibit the property of (iii) Pair Production:
luminescence when electrons in the lowest 5d level If the incoming photon has sufficient energy
decay to spin orbit split 4f ground state by emitting (1.02Mev), it can create an electron-positron pair.
a photon at 370nm. The electron is absorbed by the crystal whereas
the positron gets annihilated with another electron
Scintillator from the crystal and emits two photos at 0.511MeV.
When a quanta of ionizing radiation passes through This creates a sharp peak at 0.511MeV.
the crystal it excites electrons in the atoms along its
Other processes like backscattering from the Pb
path. When these excited electrons come back to
shielding can also produce some light pulses in
stable states they emit low energy photons (mostly
the scintillator. Now, these luminescent photons
in the visible spectrum). This process creates a flash
are converted into electrical signals by the Photo
of low energy photons. An ideal scintillator will
Multiplier Tube.
emit number of luminescent photons proportional
to the fraction of energy of the ionization radiation Photo Multiplier (PMT)
absorbed by the crystal.
A photo-cathode which is sensitive to the scintillat-
There are three main interactions through ing photons is placed next to the crystal. When a
which energy is transferred from the high energy scintillating photon hits the photo-cathode, it emits
photons(γ- or X- rays) to the scintillating material: an electron via photo-electric effect. This emitted
electron is then accelerated toward a metal plate
(i) Photo-electric effect: called a dynode where upon impact it releases more
In this interaction, the incoming photon is com- electrons, typically 2. These in turn are accelerated
pletely absorbed and knocks off an electron from to the next dynode where each electron knocks
its orbital with some extra kinetic energy. This fast out 2 more electrons. In this manner one obtains

1

Figure 1: Dominant processes in scintillators[?]
an exponentially growing number of electrons. At
the end all the released electrons are collected at
the anode where they produce a short, measurable
electric current pulse. Note that the amplitude of
this pulse is proportional to the number of electrons
emitted from the photo-cathode which in turn is
proportional to the number of scintillating photons
striking it’s surface (among other efficiency factors,
which are constant for a given crystal).
Multi Channel Analyzer (MCA)
The amplified pulse from the PMT is then con-
verted to a number based on the pulse height by an
Analog to Digital Converter(ADC). These numbers
are then histogrammed i.e. each possible ADC
value has a counter associated with it and each time
a certain value occurs the corresponding counter is
incremented. The total set of counter values and
the corresponding ADC values is called a spectrum.
This spectrum has peaks corresponding to all the
interactions that happen in the scintillator. But the
probability of occurrence of each of those processes
depend on many factors like the density of the
crystal, energy of the radiation, atomic number
of the absorbant atom and so on. The dominant
process in different situations is shown in Figure
1 and an example spectrum is shown in Figure
2 Therefore, our aim is to calibrate the ADC
value (Channel number) with an energy scale and
then measure the energy of the photo-peak (which
translates to the energy of the incoming photon).
2
Figure 2: Typical Pulse Height Spectrum[?]
Energy Resolution
If all the processes, right from production of the
scintillating photons to the conversion of electric sig-
nal to digital one by ADC are linear all the peaks
in the spectrum will be very sharp. But there are
many sources of non-linearity present in the equip-
ment which results in broadening of the peak. En-
ergy resolution is a measure of the non-linearity in
the equipment and is defined as,
 
∆EF W HM
R= (1)
E
Since there is an intrinsic broadening associated
with the Poisson statistics followed by the high en-
ergy photons, this is quantified by
√ 1
Ri = 8 ln 2 √ (2)
N̄
where, N̄ is the average number of scintillation pho-
tons created in the crystal for every incident photon
(∝ EP hoto−peak ) and we also√know that for a Poisson
distribution the FWHM is N̄ .
But there are other factors like non-linear response
of the scintillator and inhomogeneity of the crystal,
non-uniformity of the photo-cathode, etc..[?] which
further reduce the resolution by broadening. By
plotting R vs √E 1 we can measure the deviation
P hoto
of the detector from ideal assumptions.
3 DATA ANALYSIS
Calibration of the Cnannels in the Multi-
Channel Analyser.
We had two known sources of Gamma radiation
which were Am-241 and Ba-133. We used the two
sources to estimate the energy corresponding to Energy Spectrum of Ba-133 Equation y=y0 + (A/(w*sqrt(PI/2)))*exp(-2*(
(x-xc)/w)^2)
each channel. We started by observing the Am-241 Adj. R-Square 0.99506
Value Standard Error
source using the ADC and MCA for 200 seconds. B y0 145.76523 10.07672
B xc 102.71405 0.10103

Next we measured the background radiation with- 2000

B
B
w
A
28.85561
70004.3572
0.29085
878.22876
B sigma 14.4278
out the source. B FWHM 33.97488
B Height 1935.68607

Counts(N)
Equation y=y0 + (A/(w*sqrt(PI/2)))*ex
We did the same for Ba-133 source for 250 sec- p(-2*((x-xc)/w)^2)

Adj. R-Squar 0.98948

onds. The data generated gives a histogram, con- Value Standard Erro
B y0 83.53015 8.40312
1000
stisting of how many photons of a particular en- B
B
xc
w
308.00391
48.78757
0.18266
0.75909

ergy went through a particular channel, i.e. the B

B
A
sigma
46086.2593
24.39378
1075.6398

B FWHM 57.44297
number of photons with a particular energy that B Height 753.70668

got detected in that time. We had to subtract the

background radiation data from the data obtained 0
0 200 400
from the source to obtain the correct estimate of the Channel No(n)
source radiation.

We plotted the data and fitted the observed peaks Figure 4:

using a gaussian function. This process smoothens
out the jittery-ness in the data and we get a aver-
aged out gaussian curve, which helps in obtaining
Source Energy(KeV) Channel No.
the peaks. From the fit we can estimate channel
First peak Ba-133 31.903 103
number corresponding to the most intense radia-
Second peak Am-241 54.392 222
tion, i.e. the channel number in which there is the
highest number of photons.
Table no 1
From figure (3) and figure(4), we observe, that From this data we can construct a straight line
there are two peaks corresponding for each of the
graph which will essentially calibrate our device.
two known source. Two energy corresponding to
The slope and intercept are shown in table(2).
two different peaks were given to us. One was from
the Am-241 and the other was from Ba-133. The
given data and the corresponding observed channel Slope(m) 0.231
numbers corresponding to then are: Intercept(a) 8.11

Table no 2
Energy Spectrum of Am-241 After that, using the slope and intercept informa-
Equation y=y0 + (A/(w*sqrt(PI/2)))*e Equation y=y0 + (A/(w*sqrt(PI/2)))*exp(-2*(
6000 xp(-2*((x-xc)/w)^2) (x-xc)/w)^2) tion of the graph, we mapped the channel number
Adj. R-Squa 0.94621
Value Standard Err
Adj. R-Sq 0.99928
Value Standard
for the peaks to its corresponding energy.
B y0 -733.85616 285.00145
B y0 73.90295 9.14944
B xc 58.21085 0.34484
B xc 221.8096 0.04426
B w 72.98035 8.48833
B w 38.47636 0.13057
B A 158760.071 43702.1198
4000 B A 243979.8 1047.160
B
B
sigma
FWHM
36.49017
85.92779 B sigma 19.23818 E = m × (channel no) + a (3)
Counts(N)

B Height 1735.70299 B FWHM 45.30246

B Height 5059.411

2000 We then observe the unknown source for 250 sec-

onds. We have followed the same procedure . The
histogram corresponding to the unknown source is
0 shown in figure(5). Hence, the table (3) shows 6
0 100 200 300
Channel no(n)
datapoints, two peaks from each source. The table
also contains the energy values of the channel num-
bers’ corresponding to the peaks of both known and
Figure 3: unknown sources.

3
 Figure 5:

Source Channel Number Energy(KeV) Figure 6:

Ba 103 31.903
Ba 308 79.258 Figure (6) indeed shows that a straight line was
Am 58 21.508 obtained.
Am 222 54.392
Unknown 19 12.490
Unknown 67 23.587 4 Result and Conclusion
Table no 3
(1) In the experiment we have calculated the en-
ergies of X-rays of the unknown source. The first
X-ray peak energy corresponds to 12.490 KeV and
Figure (6) show the graph between energy and
the second peak corresponds to 23.587 KeV. The ac-
the channel number. We can see, as expected, it
tual second X-ray peak energy of Ba133 is 81 KeV
is a straight line. Thus, we found the energy of
and the first X-ray peak energy of Am-241 is around
the peak radiation corresponding to the unknown
19.5 Kev. From calibration we got almost accurate
source. Thus the gamma ray spectra of the un-
values of the corresponds to the two energies which
known source was created through the experiment.
are 79.258 KeV and 21.508 KeV respectively from
Table(3). So we can expect that the X-ray peak en-
Resolution of the detector. ergies of the unknown source will also be close to
The resolution of the detector is calculated from the the actual values.
FWHM-(Full width at half maximum) data. En- (2) For the case of first X-ray peak of Am-241 there
ergy resolution is a measure of the non-linearity in are actually a few small peaks . So in the histogram
the equipment. The Resolution R is measured as: the first peak was not properly coming and it was
a broadened peak . While it was fitted to Gaus-
sian the FWHM was very large .That’s why we have
F W HM omitted the point corresponds to that peak and we
R= got a straight line curve as expected theoretically.
Energy corresponding to maximum peak
  (4)
1
The resolution was plotted againt √
E
, where E is 5 Acknowledgement
the energy of the channel corresponding to the the
maximum peak. We expect a straight line graph We are very grateful to Sir Shri Tilak B Katoch
according to the explanation given in theory section. for guiding us in performing the experiment. We

4
also like to thank to Dept. of Astronomy Astro-
physics and the Scintillation Detector Lab for giv-
ing us very good facility and offering us such a great
experiment.

6 References
[1] https://scionix.nl/scintillation-detectors
[2] Non-proportionality in the scintillation response
and the energy resolution obtainable with scintil-
lation crystals, author=Dorenbos, P and De Haas,
JTM and Van Eijk, CWE, journal=IEEE Transac-
tions on Nuclear Science, volume=42, number=6,
pages=2190–2202, year=1995, publisher=IEEE
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillationc ounter
[4]https : //en.wikibooks.org/wiki/BasicP hysicsof
N uclearM edicine/ScintillationD etectors