A method for establishing absolute full-energy peak efficiency and its confidence interval for HPGe detectors

A method is proposed for establishing the absolute efficiency calibration of a HPGe detector including the confidence interval in the energy range of 79.6–3451.2 keV. The calibrations were accomplished with the 133Ba, 60Co, 56Co and 152Eu point-like radioactive sources with only the 60Co source being activity calibrated to an accuracy of 2% at the 90% confidence level. All data sets measured from activity calibrated and uncalibrated sources were fit simultaneously using the linearized least squares method. The proposed fit function accounts for scaling of the data taken with activity uncalibrated sources to the data taken with the high accuracy activity calibrated source. The confidence interval for the fit was found analytically using the covariance matrix. Accuracy of the fit was below 3.5% at the 90% confidence level in the 79.6–3451.2 keV energy range.