Spatial and spectral gamma-ray response of plastic scintillators used in portal radiation detectors; comparison of measurements and simulations

Portal radiation detectors are commonly used by steel industries in the probing and detection of radioactivity contamination in scrap metal. Furthermore, a large number of portal monitors are installed at the border crossings to prevent illegal radioactive material trafficking. These portal detectors typically consist of either PS (polystyrene) or PVT (polyvinyltoluene) plastic scintillating detectors. Through the electronic circuit of the detector, an energy region-of-interest window can be determined in order to focus on the detection of certain radionuclides. In this study, the spatial response of a portalʹs PS scintillator to a Cs-137 and a Co-60 source for various energy region-of-interest windows is presented. Furthermore, a number of measured spectra for different source positions on the surface of the scintillating detector are shown. The measured spatial response showed a quantitative and qualitative dependence on the energy window used each time. In addition, measured spectra showed energy shifts for different positions of the two sources on the detector surface. The aforementioned phenomena could not be adequately explained and modelled using gamma-particle transport Monte Carlo simulation tools, such as the MCNP4C2 code. In order to fully explain these phenomena, we performed optical simulations, modelling the transport of the light yield within the detector, using Gate v3.0.0 with Geant 4.8.0p01 of CERN. The results of those simulations are presented and compared to the measured ones.