PDSW: A program for the calculation of photon energy distribution resulting from radioactive elements in seawater Original Research Article

Photons, when emitted from radioactive sources in seawater, are subsequent to multiple scattering mechanisms, namely the photoelectric effect, the Compton scattering and the pair production effect. Thus, the monoenergetic emission of photons in seawater will result in equilibrium in a distribution of photons with different energies. PDSW is a MATLAB program which calculates this distribution and can be found useful for the characterization of measured spectra obtained by gamma detectors such as NaI(Tl). PDSW has been developed as an autonomous MATLAB function in order to make possible to integrate it in other applications. All calculations are performed using a typical value for seawater salinity (3.5%).