Experiences with active cosmic background suppression

The dominant source of background in a bare germanium gamma-ray detector is natural radiation originating from potassium, uranium, and thorium decay in the laboratory environment and from cosmic rays. Most of the background is removed by surrounding the detector with lead shielding, which is commonly 20 cm thick. In a well-shielded detector, the largest contributor to the integral counting rate is cosmic rays, and to a lesser extent beta particles from {sup 210}Pb. Most of the counting rate in the continuum is due to highly penetrating muons. Many of the characteristic peaks in the background also originate from fast tertiary neutrons of cosmic-ray origin, which generate neutron activation products or create gamma rays from inelastic scattering in materials of the detector and shield. Very massive shielding is required to remove this penetrating component of background; we have found a fivefold reduction in the cosmic components by moving the detector into a laboratory 20 m underground. However, lacking an underground lab, we have attempted to use active shielding to reduce the background of a Ge detector located above ground. The guard detector is a proportional counter forming a roof 23 cm above the detector. The counter is placed inside the leadmore » shielding to reduce it`s background counting rate.« less