Development of a procedure for hyper-pure germanium detector response calibration combining experimental measurements with Monte Carlo simulations

Resumo

Knowledge of the efficiency curve of hyper-pure germanium (HPGe) detectors is essential for a broad range of applications. However, its accurate determination requires lengthy and costly experiments. Although there have been some attempts in the past to produce a method based on Monte Carlo simulations of the detector to make less difficult to obtain the efficiency curve, none of them has reached accuracies better than 5%. During the proposed project we intend to perform a systematic study of all major parameters that determine the agreement between an experimental and a simulated efficiency curve. We shall take into account the dimensions of the crystal, the modeling of dead layers, the incomplete charge collection, the electric field in the detector and charge carrier traps. The objective is to produce a method for determining the efficiency curve in which not only the agreement of the full energy peak is sought, but also of the single and double escape peaks and the continuum part of the spectrum. (AU)