Computational aspects in modelling the interaction of low-energy X-rays with liquid scintillators

The commercial liquid scintillators available nowadays are mostly complex cocktails that frequently include non-negligible amounts of heavier elements than the commonly expected carbon or hydrogen. In May 1993, nine laboratories agreed to participate in the frame of the EUROMET project in a comparison of the activity concentration measurement of 55Fe. One particular aspect of the results that caught one's eye was a small systematic difference between the activity concentrations obtained with Ultima Gold and Insta Gel. The detection of the radiation emitted by EC nuclides involves, in addition to the atomic rearrangement generated by the capture of the electron by the nucleus, a frequently ignored secondary atomic rearrangement process due to photoionization. Such a process can be neglected for scintillators that only contain hydrogen and carbon, e.g., toluene, but must be taken into account when the EC nuclide solution is incorporated to cocktails with heavier elements, e.g., Ultima Gold. All along the present year, an improved version of the program EMI has been developed. This code adds the photoionization reduced energy correction to the previous versions, and successfully explains the systematic difference between the measured activity concentrations of 55Fe in Ultima Gold and Insta Gel.