Eur. Phys. J. C (2018) 78: 392
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-018-5852-7

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Improving sensitivity of a BEGe-based high-purity germanium spectrometer through pulse shape analysis

¹ M. Smoluchowski Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University, Lojasiewicza 11, 30-348, Kraków, Poland
² European Commission, DG JRC, JRC-Geel, Retieseweg 111, 2440, Geel, Belgium

^* e-mail: krzysztof.panas@doctoral.uj.edu.pl

Received: 23 December 2017
Accepted: 26 April 2018
Published online: 18 May 2018

Abstract

We performed Pulse Shape Analysis to separate single-scattered gamma energy deposition events from multiple-scattered photons in a high-sensitivity -ray spectrometer. The spectrometer is based on a Broad Energy High Purity Germanium detector and the developed technique uses multivariate analysis by an application of the Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network. A very good separation of the single-site- and multi-site events was achieved leading to a significant reduction of the background level of the investigated spectrometer – the double escape peak, rich in single-site events, was reduced by 95%, while the full energy peaks lost at most 25% of their counts. The peak to Compton ratio, calculated for the 2614.5 keV gamma line from Tl, was improved by 114.3%.