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Brett Schuessler
Unveristy of Hawaii at Manoa
Physics 480L: Tom Browder
brettsch@hawaii.edu
This lab studied emission spectra of two radioactive sources: 60 Co and 137 Cs. The 1.17 MeV -ray
Compton Edge for 60 Co was found to be (0.952 0.017) MeV - within 1 of the calculated value of
0.96 MeV. The Compton Edge for the 0.662 MeV photon released in 137 Cs was found to be (0.44
0.015) MeV - almost 3 from the calculated value of 0.477 MeV. The absorption coefficients, , for
Aluminum and Lead were experimentally verified well with values given by the National Institutes
of Science and Technology (NIST), results are given in Tables I and II.
INTRODUCTION
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
E0 =
E
1 + (1 cos)E /me c2
(1)
Emax =
2E2
me c2 + 2E
(2)
(3)
EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE
Energy Calibration
Energy Calibration to MCA channel number using the initial calibration data from the first day of
experiment proved to be drastically different from
the baseline data with no absorbers in place taken
on the second day - despite an attempt to match the
amplifier gain between the two lab sessions (Figure
2). In addition, for reasons postulated in a later section, the energy-channel correspondence undergoes
an apparent shift towards lower channel numbers
with continued equipment operation (note Figures
3, 4).
In spite of this drift, the difference in channel numbers between features of known energy appears to be
constant. Therefore, for the purposes of absorption
coefficient determination, the average channel difference between the two 60 Co photopeaks (for each absorber thicknesses) was used to calibrate the MCA
channel energy. By averaging the 60 Co photopeak
channel values in both the case of Aluminum and
Lead (Figures 7, 8 and Figures 9, 10, respectively)
and taking their difference, we obtain the channel
energy width to be (842 58) eV.
This same energy calibration was used for the
137
Cs data because a) Cesium only has one photopeak which precludes this process, and b) the data
for both sources was taken within one lab session
with all the same gain settings.
ANALYSIS
60
FIG. 7:
60
Averaging all the differences between each Compton Edge fit channel number and the 1.17 MeV photopeak channel for each absorber thickness gives an
experimental energy value for the Compton Edge at
(0.952 0.017) MeV - within 1 of the calculated
value of 0.96 MeV.
137
Although both the 1.17 MeV and 1.33 MeV rays have their own associated Compton Edges - the
Compton Edge from the 1.33 MeV -ray is located
at 1.12 MeV, too close in energy to the 1.17 MeV
photopeak to resolve using fitting. Therefore our
analysis regards only the Compton Edge from the
1.17 MeV -ray located at 0.96 MeV.
FIG. 8:
60
FIG. 10:
FIG. 11:
FIG. 9:
60
60
137
For the experimental determination of the absorption coefficient, , the photopeak height counts
obtained from the asymmetric gaussian fit were
used as relative intensity values for the relation
shown in Equation 3.
Although the intensity
would be more accurately captured by integrating
the photopeak - the lack of a systematic way to
proceed about picking bounds of integration leads
to a lack of independent reproducibility in results,
and therefore the photopeak height method was
chosen instead. The linear fits to log peak height
data for Aluminum is graphed in Figure 12 and
the experimental values for displayed in Table 1.
The same for Lead is shown in Figure 13 and Table 2.
CONCLUSION
Energy
exp
0.662 MeV 0.182 0.017
1.17 MeV 0.146 0.015
1.33 MeV 0.137 0.015
N IST
0.19
0.16
0.14
N IST
1.20
0.74
0.63