Simulation of the Kinetic Energy Spectrum of Primary Electron Generated by a 6 keV X-Ray Source in a Gas Volume

Abstract

With the intention of creating a complete simulation of the Thick GEM detector, this work presents a partial simulation of the interaction of 6 keV X-Ray radiation with a gas volume. For the gas, it was used pure Argon, Xenon and CO2 as well as a mixture of each noble gas with CO2 in a 70\%-30\% proportion. For this range of energy, the dominant physical effect is the photoelectric, therefore knowing the binding energies of the atoms we predict the kinetic energy of the primary electron. A simulated energy spectrum of the primary electron kinetic energy was obtained, which contains peaks corresponding to the inner shell's ionization of the atoms. The spectrum shows very little Compton effect, transferring only small energies (in the order of eVs). We concluded that energy spectrum for the mixture is a linear combination of the spectrum of its individual components.