Radial position of single-site gamma-ray interactions from a parametric pulse shape analysis of germanium detector signals

Abstract

Pulse shape analysis of germanium gamma-ray spectrometer signals can yield information on the radial position of individual gamma-ray interactions within the germanium crystal. A parametric pulse shape analysis based on calculation of moments of the reconstructed current pulses from a closed-ended coaxial germanium detector is used to preferentially select single-site gamma-ray interactions. The double escape peak events from the 2614.5 keV gamma-ray of 208-Tl are used as a training set to optimize the single-site event selection region in the pulse shape parameter space. A collimated source of 320.1 keV gamma-rays from 51-Cr is used to scan different radial positions of the same semi-coaxial germanium detector. The previously trained single-site selection region is used to preferentially identify the single-site photoelectric absorption events from the 320.1 keV full-energy peak. From the identified events, a comparison of the pulse shape parameter space distributions between different scan positions allows radial interaction location information to be collected.