Multielement photon activation analysis of a bulk lanthanum sample by a Ge-BGO Compton-suppression spectrometer

Photon activation analysis with a Ge-BGO Compton-suppression γ spectrometer has been studied for measuring the concentration of trace elements in a bulk lanthanum sample. Thirteen kinds of trace elements included in a test sample system have been analyzed, and the detection limit ranges from 9 × 10−2 to 1 × 10−3 μg/g, which corresponds to improvement by a factor of from 1.5 to 2.5 over that obtained by a conventional γ-ray spectrometer.