Efficiency transfer using the GEANT4 code of CERN for HPGe gamma spectrometry

• The GEANT4 code of CERN has been used to transfer the peak efficiency from point to points and voluminous detection configurations in HPGe gamma spectrometry.
• The usual procedure of efficiency transfer based on the Moens concept has been adopted for the efficiency transfer.
• A new method of efficiency transfer based on a “virtual” reference point detection configuration has been developed and used.
• The GEANT4 code has been used to perform direct calculation of the peak efficiencies.
• The two used efficiency transfer procedures were in agreement with experimental results.

In this work we apply the GEANT4 code of CERN to calculate the peak efficiency in High Pure Germanium (HPGe) gamma spectrometry using three different procedures. The first is a direct calculation. The second corresponds to the usual case of efficiency transfer between two different configurations at constant emission energy assuming a reference point detection configuration and the third, a new procedure, consists on the transfer of the peak efficiency between two detection configurations emitting the gamma ray in different energies assuming a “virtual” reference point detection configuration. No pre-optimization of the detector geometrical characteristics was performed before the transfer to test the ability of the efficiency transfer to reduce the effect of the ignorance on their real magnitude on the quality of the transferred efficiency. The obtained and measured efficiencies were found in good agreement for the two investigated methods of efficiency transfer. The obtained agreement proves that Monte Carlo method and especially the GEANT4 code constitute an efficient tool to obtain accurate detection efficiency values. The second investigated efficiency transfer procedure is useful to calibrate the HPGe gamma detector for any emission energy value for a voluminous source using one point source detection efficiency emitting in a different energy as a reference efficiency. The calculations preformed in this work were applied to the measurement exercise of the EUROMET428 project. A measurement exercise where an evaluation of the full energy peak efficiencies in the energy range 60–2000 keV for a typical coaxial p-type HpGe detector and several types of source configuration: point sources located at various distances from the detector and a cylindrical box containing three matrices was performed.