COCO, a Compton coincidence experiment to study liquid scintillator response in the 1-20 keV energy range

The use of Liquid Scintillation Counting (LSC) as a fundamental radionuclide standardisation method requires a correct description of the physical phenomena occurring during the LSC process. In that framework, a special point of interest is the description of the liquid scintillator response, especially for low-energy electrons, in a region where this response is known to be non-linear. As there is no simple way to produce monoenergetic electrons in the liquid scintillator, we have simulated these electrons using a Compton interaction coincidence method. Due to the energy conservation law, the selection of the energy of the scattered Compton X-ray photon is equivalent to the selection of the energy of a monoenergetic electron. This paper describes the experimental system and the methods used to analyse the experimental results in order to deduce the statistical distribution of the photons emitted by the scintillator. The effects of some artefacts are discussed, including the accidental coincidences and the influence of cascade Compton interactions. ((orig.))