Berries from the Ukraine and HPGe Spectra

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GigaBecquerel
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Berries from the Ukraine and HPGe Spectra

Post by GigaBecquerel » 13 Aug 2020, 20:28

Hello Guys!

Recently I got some blueberries from a supermarket in the ukraine, were exactly I cannot say.
Sadly the person who sent me them forgot to weigh them before further treatment, so the specific activity cannot be measured.
Because it is hard to send food from the Ukraine to Germany he went the easy route, dried them and mixed them with epoxy to be cast into an Energy Pendant. As we all know those can pass all borders with any activity ;-)

So, I put them in my lead castle and started the measurement:
photo_2020-08-13_12-21-02.jpg
The detector is a Canberra GC2020 that I repaired earlier this year, sadly it's far from its peak performance.

The resulting spectrum is an incredibly clean ¹³⁷Cs spectrum, almost like a textbook example:
Cslin.PNG
Cslin.PNG (61.1 KiB) Viewed 2169 times
The lower energy peak is missing, as my Detector is basically blind below 50 keV.

In a logarythmic view you can see that the only other peaks in my spectrum are ⁴⁰K from the berries (and because that peak is everywhere), ²¹⁴Bi from the Radon in my basement and a tiny bit of 511 keV, both from the ⁴⁰K and cosmics interacting with the lead.
Cslog.PNG
Cslog.PNG (63.85 KiB) Viewed 2169 times
I can't measure the activity yet, but I'm working on a standard for that, it just takes a bit of time to collect everything for that.
The raw peak is 3.59 cps above the baseline, guesstimation is 50-100 Bq of ¹³⁷Cs.
Cspeak.PNG
Cspeak.PNG (70.02 KiB) Viewed 2169 times
Best Regards,
Lukas

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Go-Figure
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Re: Berries from the Ukraine and HPGe Spectra

Post by Go-Figure » 30 Aug 2020, 07:42

Interesting, if you have to chance to find some more of these "Berries" let me know :)
Where did you get your HPGe detector?

Massimo

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GigaBecquerel
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Re: Berries from the Ukraine and HPGe Spectra

Post by GigaBecquerel » 30 Aug 2020, 17:13

Hello Massimo,

I'll see what I can do!
One of my twitter followers offered to send me them, and I'm not sure how far I can "stretch" that offer...
I wonder if one could just ask the many ukrainian sellers on ebay

I got the HPGe from an old work of mine (decontamination), and hat to repair it myself:
https://gigabecquerel.wordpress.com/202 ... -part-1-n/

Lukas

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