Why compton-suppressed germanium detector arrays?

Nuclear spectroscopic studies have provided a strong incentive to obtain γ-ray detectors with increasingly better energy resolution, higher full-energy peak efficiencies, and greater sensitivity or resolving power. A major step was the introduction of Ge detectors in the early 60's. But because of the low atomic number of Ge they have a poor response function; a majority of interacting gamma rays of moderate energy Compton scatter out of the detector leaving a large low-energy background. The remedy was to add a Compton-suppression shield made of NaI around the Ge crystal, and if interactions occurred simultaneously in the NaI scintillator and in the Ge detector to veto that event. Efficiencies also increased greatly when an English-Danish collaboration assembled five Ge detectors, each with a NaI suppressor, into the first array at the end of 1980. Obviously, a system of five such detectors gave much better statistics than the usual two bare detectors used for obtaining coincidence data (by a factor of 10). A few years later, another major improvement came with replacement of the NaI suppressors with shields made of the much denser bismuth germanate (BGO) as scintillator, as these could be thinner leading to arrays with of order 20 detectors. Use of such a large number of detectors led to the realization that for cascades of coincident gamma rays, as in going down a band, the improvement in the peak/background ratio observed and already appreciated in going from singles spectra to gated (double-) coincidence spectra continued when doubly-gated triple-coincidence data were compared for the first time to singly-gated double-coincidence ones. The higher-gated spectra were much cleaner and more selective, though with poorer statistics, and the advantages of higher folds and efficiencies led to the proposals for the larger 4π arrays of today, Eurogam and GASP in Europe and Gammasphere in the U.S