Programs in C for parameterizing measured 5″ × 5″ NaI gamma response functions and unfolding of continuous gamma spectra Original Research Article

A 5″ × 5″ NaI(Tl) detector has been used to measure gamma-ray spectra resulting from the decay of aggregate fission products. In order to extract the true gamma-ray energy distribution from the measured spectra, the detector response functions for monoenergetic gamma rays spanning the energy range of the measurements must be determined. At present we have measured 13 such response functions in the energy range 0.081–6.13 MeV. NGRC is a program in C written to implement an interpolation scheme for estimating the response function at any other intermediate energy. This program takes a library of response function tails and constructs a response function matrix which is used as input to a second program CRSUP written for obtaining gamma-ray energy distributions. It assumes the measured spectrum consists of a superposition of a specified number of response functions placed at energies determined by the program according to the detector resolution and spectrum end point energy. The program then computes the distribution of the strength of the response functions in a least-squares fashion. This program is designed to maximize the number of response functions that can be used in modeling the measured spectrum without reducing the number of bins used in each response function. The response functions constructed by the interpolation procedure have been used in the program SPEC-FIT to fit in a least-squares fashion the gamma-ray spectrum of 152Eu. The fit is an excellent reproduction of both the photopeak and continuous regions of the entire measured spectrum. Finally the validity of the least-square method implemented by CRSUP has also been tested by using this program to unfold an analytically constructed continuous spectrum. The results obtained were in excellent agreement with the assumed distribution function, illustrating the applicability of CRSUP for unfolding other types of continuous spectra as encountered in beta, neutron-time-of-flight and Rutherford-backscattering spectroscopy.