Shielding and build-up considerations for radiation detection

Shielding for gamma radiation has traditionally focused on the reduction of dose effects. For these applications, reducing the energy of the radiation is important along with reducing the actual number of photons, and therefore large masses of high Z material are typically used. However, for measurements requiring low backgrounds or for detecting low activity signals, such as in homeland security applications, the primary use of shielding is to decrease the total number of background photons (perhaps in a region of interest), and therefore the processes of buildup and down scattering become important. In these applications, where the important measure is count rate instead of dose and low background are important, improved reduction in counts from background radiation may be achieved with specially designed configurations of thin layers of different materials instead of a single thick layer. This paper describes recent modeling and experimental investigations in layered-shielding methodology, provides results with comparison to single shielding material such as Pb, and discusses applications of detector systems for homeland security.