Diagnostics of a Gamma Ray Beam with Compton Scattering off a Cu Plate (2010)

Undergraduate: Laura Havener

Faculty Advisor: Hugon Karwowski
Department: Physics & Astronomy

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In the experiments performed at High Intensity Gamma Ray Source located at Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory the flux of incident gamma ray beam has to be precisely determined. This is done by scattering the incident beam off a few mm thick Cu plate and observing scattered photons in a Ge or NaI detector located at a small angle with respect to the beam direction. In this work Monte Carlo simulations of the gamma ray energy spectra at different angles are performed. Spectra are generated as a function of incident gamma ray beam and the detector angle to optimize the detectors’ response function. The simulations were run using Geant4 simulation toolkit and the data analysis was done by ROOT data analysis system.