Gamma Spectrometry Forum

Marco, Thanks for the response!The NaI:Tl GS2020 kit with a GS-USB-PRO box I have has been a problem for me. You can see the thread "Problems calibrating between 1500-2600 keV" . I find that bias voltages LOW ENOUGH to give a fairly linear calibration curve also have a low count rate. (I a...

Thanks, Marco!
Could you say more about how you calibrated the CsI and NaI data? What bias voltages, etc?

Joseph--thanks for your posting! I have tried most of your suggestions (polynomial order) both recently and in the distant past without success. And the GADRAS-DRF software (more below) does a good job of producing a (typical-looking scintillator efficiency curve given the dimensions, material, and ...

Kailie, Thanks for the explanation! This sounds a lot like thermoluminescence. In the context of archaeology, for example, ceramics used for pots are of course baked when they are made. Thereafter, they absorb background radiation over centuries. Because many ceramics are non-crystalline, they have ...

Hi Kailie, Welcome! If you follow the links to "Advanced search" you can pull up SOME information about detecting muons. I'm curious about how muons can contribute charge in some materials--do you mean that they IONIZE atoms in the materials and this is collected by a detector? (They lose ...

Magnus and Bob, Thanks for your notes! My understanding at present is that muons (produced at the top of the atmosphere) are prodigiously more energetic than gamma rays and have a range of energies (GeV up to hundreds of TeV), average about 6 GeV. You can see in background count rates with a Geiger-...

Steven--thanks for all of the information, based on experience and expertise! This is above the call of duty! As a theoretical physicist, I tended to accept things as I measured them, rather than understanding how I could tweak things to make problems go away. (And my last exposure to [mostly] analo...

500VCalibPlot.png Steven--thanks for the remarks about boost being strictly a software effect and having the potential for producing artifacts. Digging back into 5-year old data I took (I have a GS2020 kit with a GS-USB-PRO box) it is clear that my early work had not focused on calibration curves, ...

For those following this thread, I 'm including calibration curves (keV vs. AU) for my usual situation (bias voltage 700, no boost gain in PRA) when I drop the bias to 600 V but increase the boost gain to 4. I was hoping to have a linear dependence for a broader range of AU. This APPEARS to be true,...

Steven--Thanks for following up! It's funny how one can get stuck in old habits. I ran lots of careful tests 5 years ago deciding on the mix of bias and audio gain, without thinking much about ease of calibration. Since 700V was the recommended bias, I stuck to that for a long while and only later n...