Article

Calculation of self-absorption and coincidence summing correction factors for the extended sources using GEANT4

Department of Nuclear Science and Technology, School of Energy and Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, PR China

^* Corresponding author: hechaohui@xjtu.edu.cn

Received: 27 September 2018
Accepted: 12 February 2019

Abstract

A detailed study of the full energy peak efficiency of a high purity germanium (HPGe) detector including the effect of source self-absorption and coincidence summing was performed using Monte Carlo simulation, as it is difficult and time-consuming to measure the full energy peak efficiency experimentally. Cylindrical water composition source was simulated with different characteristics, covering the energy range from 60 to 1836 keV. Self-absorption correction factors (SAF_cal) were calculated for two source volumes and obtained good agreement with the experimental results except for (⁶⁰Co and ⁸⁸Y) nuclides. The simulation was performed for various samples with different densities and observed their effects on the full energy peak efficiency value of the detector. In the case of extended volumetric source, the coincidence summing correction factors (CSF_cal) for two nuclides (⁶⁰Co and ⁸⁸Y) were estimated with the GEANT4 simulation toolkit. The effect of correction factors on different cylindrical source volumes was also investigated. With the self-absorption and coincidence summing effect, the best agreement was achieved between simulated and experimental results with discrepancy less than 2% for all of the radionuclides included in two source volumes.