Protactinium

[Peter-1]

The goal was to better recognize Protactinium.
In my small sample of UO2 only 2 lines were visible, which I identified as Pa234. Thorium's strong lines dominated the diagram. The idea was to use a filter to weaken the low energies and thus better recognize the weak lines in the higher energy range. For this I placed a copper sheet with a thickness of 21mm between the sample and the NaI crystal. This made the lines at 258 , 742, 766, 786 and 1001keV more visible. Are there any suggestions?

2020_04_17-UO2.png

2020_04_17-UO2-Cu-21.png

Peter

[Sparky]

I think your filter idea worked very well. You could have just limited your max Energy setting to 250 keV and just let Theremino scale the plot using the Pa234 peaks.
Or, using log y enhances smaller peaks somewhat relative to larger ones.

This looks like depleted Uranium to me.

[Sesselmann]

Peter,

In PRA there is a function called "Sum Qty" it multiplies counts by bin number and enhances the higher energy peaks while reducing the low energy peaks. Very handy for doing just what you did above.

Steven

[Geoff]

For more information about filtering gamma rays you can check out this paper Gamma Ray Interactions with Matter by G. Nelson and D Reilly.

I used a cadmium filter to detect the higher energy gamma rays in a 40 year old americium source.


[Broken link removed - Steven]

[Peter-1]

hello Steven,
if I understand you correctly, it is a multiplication of the number of impulses by their energy. Since I am not familiar with PRA, I wrote a small program with which I can achieve the increase in higher energies. Is the behavior shown in the example correct?

2020_04-Beispiel.png

Greetings
Peter

[Go-Figure]

Peter,

In PRA there is a function called "Sum Qty" it multiplies counts by bin number and enhances the higher energy peaks while reducing the low energy peaks. Very handy for doing just what you did above.

Steven

I quote Steven, the "energy per bin" function in PRA is pure gold to better see high energy peaks with low counts.

Massimo