The natural (40K) and anthropogenic (137Cs) radioactivity concentration in four different typologies of early childhood (up to two years old) foods, i.e., homogenized fruit, meat, biscuits baby pasta, produced Italy sold Italian large retailers, was investigated through High Purity Germanium (HPGe) gamma spectrometry. present study is carried out with the aim to: (i) evaluate background levels ...

A method to utilize CdZnTe (CZT) detectors in diagnostic x-ray spectroscopy is described in this article. Spectral distortion due to transmission of primary x rays, the escape of cadmium- and tellurium-K fluorescent x rays, and tailing was severe in measured x-ray spectra. Therefore, correction for the distortion was performed with the stripping method using response functions. The response fun...

DETECTOR RESOLUTION Resolution is a measure of the width (full width half max) of a single energy peak at a specific energy, either expressed in absolute keV (as with Germanium Detectors), or as a percentage of the energy at that point (Sodium Iodide Detectors). Better (lower FWHM value) resolution enables the system to more clearly separate the peaks within a spectrum. Figure 1.2 shows two spe...

Radioactivity of terrestrial radionuclides Ra, Th and K in phosphate rock samples has been measured using gamma ray spectrometry system with an HPGe detector. The samples showed fairly high mean concentrations, 410±39 Bq.kg of Ra, 7.9±0.95 of Th and 37.6±4 of K. Mean absorbed gamma dose rate of 181.9±20 nGy.h was measured in air. Assessment of radiological hazards was made by calculating radium...

We revisit calculations of the cosmogenic production rates for several long-lived isotopes that are potential sources of background in searching for rare physics processes such as the detection of dark matter and neutrinoless double-beta decay. Using updated cosmic-ray neutron flux measurements, we use TALYS 1.0 to investigate the cosmogenic activation of stable isotopes of several detector tar...

DETECTOR RESOLUTION Resolution is a measure of the width (full width half max) of a single energy peak at a specific energy, either expressed in absolute keV (as with Germanium Detectors), or as a percentage of the energy at that point (Sodium Iodide Detectors). Better (lower FWHM value) resolution enables the system to more clearly separate the peaks within a spectrum. Figure 1.2 shows two spe...

Flowback and produced wastewaters from unconventional hydraulic fracturing during oil and gas explorations typically brings to the surface Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials (NORM), predominantly radioisotopes from the U238 and Th232 decay chains. Traditionally, radiological sampling are performed by sending collected small samples for laboratory tests either by radiochemical analysis or...

A new type of radiation detector, a p-type modified electrode germanium diode, is presented. It is shown that the prototype displays, for the first time, a combination of features (mass, energy threshold and background expectation) required for a measurement of coherent neutrino–nucleus scattering in a nuclear reactor experiment. First results are presented from its calibration using sub-kiloel...