The Determination of Absolute Intensity of 234mPa's 1001 keV Gamma Emission Using Monte Carlo Simulation

The 1001 keV gamma line of Pa-234m became important in gamma spectrometric measurements of samples with U-238 content with the advent of development of HpGe detectors of great dimension and high efficiency. In this study the emission probability of the 1001 keV (Y-gamma) peak of Pa-234m, was determined by gamma-ray spectrometric measurements performed on glass with Uranium content using Monte Carlo simulation code for efficiency calibration. This method of calculation was not applied for the values quoted in literature so far, at least to our knowledge. The measurements gave an average of 0.836 +/- 0.022%, a value that is in very good agreement to some of the recent results previously presented.