title: Cosmic-muon intensity measurement and overburden estimation in a building at surface level and in an underground facility using two BC408 scintillation detectors coincidence counting system.
abstract: A series of measurements have been recently conducted to determine the cosmic-muon intensities and attenuation factors at various indoor and underground locations for a gamma spectrometer. For this purpose, a digital coincidence spectrometer was developed by using two BC408 plastic scintillation detectors and an XIA LLC Digital Gamma Finder (DGF)/Pixie-4 software and card package. The results indicate that the overburden in the building at surface level absorbs a large part of cosmic ray protons while attenuating the cosmic-muon intensity by 20-50%. The underground facility has the largest overburden of 39 m water equivalent, where the cosmic-muon intensity is reduced by a factor of 6. The study provides a cosmic-muon intensity measurement and overburden assessment, which are important parameters for analysing the background of an HPGe counting system, or for comparing the background of similar systems.
authors.affiliation: Radiation Protection Bureau of Health Canada, 775 Brookfield Road, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 1C1, Canada. Electronic address: weihua.zhang@hc-sc.gc.ca.
authors.forename: Weihua
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Radiation Protection Bureau of Health Canada, 775 Brookfield Road, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 1C1, Canada.
authors.forename: Kurt
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ungar
authors.affiliation: Radiation Protection Bureau of Health Canada, 775 Brookfield Road, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 1C1, Canada.
authors.forename: Chuanlei
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Radiation Protection Bureau of Health Canada, 775 Brookfield Road, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 1C1, Canada.
authors.forename: Maverick
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mailhot
mesh_terms: D003359:Cosmic Radiation; D008651:Mesons; D011834:Radiation Monitoring / Q000379:methods*; D012588:Scintillation Counting; D013051:Spectrometry, Gamma
keywords: Cosmic-muon intensity; HPGe detector; Overburden; Plastic scintillation detector; Radiation background