Effect of Several -ray Stopping Layers and Uncertainty of X-ray Yields on the BIXS Method

Tritium analysis has an extensive application in the study of fusion reactor and nuclear technology. β-decay induced X-ray spectroscopy (BIXS) is a nondestructive tritium analysis technique, and it can detect deeper tritium distributions (~0.1 mm and ~1 mm for high-Z materials and low-Z materials, respectively). In the BIXS method, a metal film as β-ray stopping layer has advantages of eliminating the interference of polarizational bremsstrahlung and reducing the detector’s signal pile-up. In order to study the effect of several β-ray stopping layers on the BIXS method, in this paper, we use the Monte Carlo code PENELOPE to simulate the BIXS experiments using Al, Au metal films and Ar gas as the β-ray stopping layers, and then use the regularization method to calculate and compare the results. In this paper, we also discuss the effects of accuracy of X-ray yield and bremsstrahlung spectrum incline on the BIXS method. The study in this paper indicates that the Al film is the best β-ray stopping layer in the BIXS method.