Energy resolution in a high-pressure gas scintillation proportional chamber

A high-pressure gas scintillation proportional chamber has been designed and constructed to image x and gamma rays for medical applications. The chamber contains 4 atm of pure xenon. Ultraviolet light emitted from excited xenon atoms within the detector is collected by a hexagonal array of seven UV-sensitive photomultiplier tubes, which in turn are separated from the pressurized gas by 1-cm-thick fused-silica windows. A model was used to predict the energy resolution of the device as a function of fill-gas pressure, voltage within the detector, and light-collection efficiency. The energy resolution improved with increasing scintillation region voltage from 17% full width at half maximum (FWHM) at 1.9 kV to 10% FWHM at 3.0 kV for 59.5-keV photons; once above 1.5 kV, there was no improvement with increasing drift voltage. The addition of the signals from the peripheral phototubes to that of the center phototube did not substantially improve the energy resolution of the device. This was because the noise that was present yielded a high correlation between the phototubes; when this noise was incorporated into the model, the energy resolution of the multiphototube system was accurately estimated. The energy resolution of the gas scintillation proportional chamber was found to be superior to the sodium iodide Anger camera at 59.5 keV by a factor of 2. Further improvement can be obtained by increasing the scintillation region voltage and by increasing the light-collection efficiency by moving the scintillation region closer to the phototubes.